In the early hours of Friday, September 26th, 2008, years of ambition and months of hard work personified itself in an unorthodox manner… I’d like to introduce you to Mighty Ape:

Mighty Ape is our new online shopping site, built from the ground-up to a be complete replacement for Gameplanet Store, which launched five years ago in September, 2003.

The biggest surface upgrade that Mighty Ape introduces is the introduction of books and toys to our range. Our team is passionate about both and I believe that we have already become one of the best online options for New Zealand consumers in both categories.

Technically speaking, Mighty Ape has been a massive challenge. The addition of books has seen to this, as the sheer scale of the book range means that things need to be as optimized as possible instead of just “good enough”. (With GP Store we could get away with this somewhat, thanks to a relatively tiny product database.) The end product is something many times more complicated than GP Store, and the fact that you can’t really tell the difference is something I’m proud of. It can a little irritating that most people don’t seem to see Mighty Ape as complex project compared to GP Store, but hopefully the fact that we’ve lost no speed despite the additions is an indication that we’ve done it right.

It’s been a week and a half now since Mighty Ape launched, and so far it’s holding up well. We installed a fast new server last week to help with the extra load has been generated and although our web team is working flat out to fix things, it’s nothing that we can’t handle. Overall, I’m very very proud of what we have achieved.

For the science buffs and technical boffins curious as to how Mighty Ape came to be, the following diagram illustrates the evolution of the GP Stoiran (2003-2008) into the Mighty Ape creature: