Based on a lot of the questions we get in Customer Support, I’ve begun to think we might be slacking off on showing our friends around our nifty home—by which I mean to say, homepage.

With that purpose, I’m starting a new column called “Old News,” to take our fair BlogRiders on a tour and show you what’s behind doors you may not have noticed.  Today’s topic is:

PopCap Passport, the free discount and goodies program!

Frequently asked question #1:

How can I get a list of all the games I’ve ordered in the past?

Check out the orange tab that reads “My Orders.”  When you sign into your Passport account, that tab will take you to a full list of all the orders you’ve placed under your current email address.  If you’ve used a number of different email addresses in the past, no problem!  Just contact Customer Support and ask us to move all your past orders over to your new email address.

Frequently asked question #2:

Do you have a discount program I can sign up for?

Why yes we do!  When you create your free Passport account, you automatically start off with a 10% discount.  When you make at least 2 purchases per calendar year, you maintain a 20% discount on everything!

Air Bjorn fun fact: unicorns don't use jet fuel but pure magic to fly their planes. But they still feel a tiny bit self-conscious when they see a pegasus glide by.

Frequently asked questions #3 & 4:

Where can I get a copy of the Bejeweled 3 Strategy Guide?

Hey, have you ever thought about making Plants vs. Zombies party invitations?

Not only have we thought about it, we thunk it straight into existence!

The free gifts available on the My Offers tab may change at any time, but currently, they include two of our most commonly requested downloads!

This concludes our brief tour of the Passport wing on PopCap.com.  Please keep your hands and feet inside the BlogRide until it comes to a full and complete stop, then head on up to the top-right corner of the main page and click on Join Passport to check it out!

The name has the feel of legend.  To me anyway, and possibly because it originated on a day when I was running a fever.  When you have a fever, everything takes on a misty quality.

The PopCap Games Customer Support team is a family in the fullest sense.  We think about each other, worry about each other, and feel that we ought to “meet this new boy you’re going out with, young lady!”  So, when I got the flu and took a sick day, I vaguely recall expressing a feeling of guilt that I wasn’t in the office helping carry my share of the workload.

Watch out Dublin team! That zombie is *totally* in position to munch on your head!

The other thing it is important to know about our team is that we all love to read, particularly sci-fi/fantasy.  For about the last year, three of our team have been devoted to The Wheel of Time (in 2007, the entire team was reading Harry Potter all at once.  I made pumpkin pasties to celebrate the release of Deathly Hallows).

I am not one of the Wheel of Time readers (at least, not yet), but this is the legend of the name, as it has been told to me:

Our fearless leader, the "mama wolf."

When I apologized for being sick and letting everyone down, the reaction of protectiveness and support from the entire team was reminiscent of the wolves in the Wheel of Time.  Our resident Sawyer (just in case there are people left in the world who didn’t watch Lost, Sawyer is the guy who gives everyone nicknames) started referring to the team as the “Wolfpack.”

Seattle Wolfpack: Instead of saying cheese, I thought we should howl. I'm pretty sure not one of us looks like we know how to howl.

Sorry if that’s a long story… apparently it’s of profound importance to us that no one mistakenly assumes the name has something to do with a movie about the ill consequences of inebriation.

Nearly a year after adopting the name Wolfpack, we moved into a nice cozy section of cubicles and promptly named it the Wolfden, and at that point, well, team t-shirts seemed to be in order!  The wonderful PopCap artist Dev Madan volunteered to design us a team logo, and we had shirts made and shipped around the world to our teams in other offices.  Even though we’ve never met some of them, they’re all our wolf-brothers now, and it’s a bond you can’t deny.

Some of our Shanghai team wolfing out! Okay, they're actually smiling. But those are some infectious smiles, don't you think?

That’s part of the beauty of this place — PopCap is a family, and the people we work with every day can become the best friends of our lives.  This is not just a place where you punch a timecard and carry out your tasks.  It’s a place where you give your all alongside your family, and the world of fun you have in the meantime is the whipped cream on the sundae.

The day the shirts arrived, our tallest Seattle wolf was also sporting a very fine hat.