Wanna get loaded?

"Flash is a bit like a hammer. You can either use it as a tool, or you can use it to smash someone's head in. It's just a tool. People have used it now for long enough to know more than what you can just do easily."

The deceptively small collective is responsible for a range of high profile work, including viral marketing campaigns for Codemasters', Colin McRae Rally 2 and the Kellogg's microsite Uder's Adventure Island. But perhaps a little more interesting is the work Preloaded does for itself.

Established just over a year ago, it may be a surprise to learn that Preloaded has a staff of just four. And they're not, as they would have you believe from their viral party invitation, all Kraftwerk-esque robots. They, in their own words, "do nice things".

Corradi met Canty while working for a company called Noho, which was later bought out by Ogilvy Interactive. They both left Noho, with Canty moving into advertising and Corradi going to Telstar before moving onto London agency Good Technology, where they came into contact with Stuart. The rest is, to coin a phrase, history.

Canty explains: "We were all doing these different things at various large corporations and not feeling very comfortable with it. It made sense to break away from that and do some-thing more interesting that we actually wanted to do."

The team has gone from 'not very comfortable' to at least comfy. The Hoxton Square office is lined with arcade games, classic toys, and broken antique computers and monitors. A large white sofa wraps around one corner of the room, resting as it does on fashionable polished pine flooring. The original intention was to create an air of relaxed luxury about it. Unfortunately events conspired against them. "Basically we got the math's wrong." laughs Corradi. "We calculated that we only had to work something like 15 days a month and everything would be cushty.

Since the early days they have been workinq every hour god sends. At first it was to get by, but now it is to ensure that every piece they do is something they can be proud of. As well as producing the usual fare of Web sites, Preloaded is also getting itself a reputation for developing viral marketing campaigns. Corradi and Canty are responsible for the original 1994 Guinness screen-saver, which is generally accepted as the first example of successful viral marketing.

But it's not always an easy thing to do, and Preloaded's thoroughness has on occasion almost lost them work."The original brief that we had from Codemasters' was to make a game out of it," says Canty of the Colin McRae Rally 2 campaign. "But we thought that was a bad idea, because they'd spent hundreds of thousands on the game and we'd only be a poor imitation of that."

Corradi adds: "We were saying, 'If we do you a game, you're not doing your product any favours'. We didn't hear from them for about four weeks and we thought we'd lost the job. Then they came back and said, 'Let's just do this.'"

The finished product was a slick Flash emailer which included smooth animation, high-adrenaline music, facts about the game, and collectors cards that could be emailed to friends. So determined was Preloaded to do a good job they put everything they had into it, to the point where they were losing money.

"It's worth far more money than they paid us for, but it doesn't do us any harm." "It sheds everything we do in a good light, and we don't want to let anything out that is beneath our expectation of what it could be," adds Canty.

The skills of the four cover pretty much anything that is thrown in their direction. With the graphic, development and production talents of the team, almost all aspect of multimedia development are accounted for. But should there be the need to do something slightly beyond their remit, there is a massive pool of resources they can call upon.

Canty explains: "On the whole we try and do it all ourselves. We get freelancers in at certain times when they're required. Obviously, if there are special needs for a job, for design maybe, or illustration, then there are a whole load of people that we've known for years and we can get them to do it." This collaborative approach to development means that all the products developed by the group have a well balanced feel, with the design elements complementing the internal cogs and wheels, and vice versa.

Such is the case with the latest project which builds on the success of the Linkdup site which, in recent times, has been seeing somewhere in the region of 350,000 page impressions per month. The Linkdup PodDealer (Preloaded has registered every anagram of its name) is a standalone application that sits on the users desktop and calls upon content from the site and displays it as a screensaver. Should there be no internet connection, it uses 'pads' previously stored on the users hard drive. The Pod Dealer is interactive and the plan is to later convert it into a commercial tool, whereby companies can provide their own dynamic 'pod' content.

Capable of reading output in DHTML, Director, Flash or Java, the PodDealer uses the Internet Explorer engine to read from the Web and display the interactive content in slideshow-like format. Once viewed, the content is cached to reduce band-width problems for later viewing, only downloading it again if the content has changed.

Next on the agenda for Preloaded is video. With the increasing freedom offered by ever-greater bandwidth, this is an area they are preparing themselves for with zeal."The possibility of broadband has inspired us all to get our cameras out," says Corradi. This extra bandwidth means that they can turn back to where they began, producing CD-ROM content, but this time for the Web.

For the Preloaded staff, size doesn't matter; it's what you do with it that counts.

Originally printed in New Media Creative magazine, March 2001. Text by Chris Brock