About Great La

Early History

Great La was founded by Staircase and Fax on February 16th, 2006. Just three months later on May 4th, 2006, Great La became an official fansite of Habbo Hotel Singapore. Over the years, Great La has grown to become one of the most successful fansites of Habbo SG (and now, Habbo.com), with a large and strong fanbase.

Name

The name "Great La" comes from the common Singaporean slang, "la." (It doesn't really mean anything; it's just a filler word used by Singaporeans, e.g., "I don't want to do that, la!") Since we were originally a Habbo Singapore fansite, we thought it was a good name to use for our fansite.

The Great La Radio

The Great La Radio was introduced in 2006. Great La originally focused fully on our website and content, but decided to shift some of that focus to a radio. It proved to be a success, and is now one of our most popular features!

The New Great La

On October 13th, 2007, Great La restarted as a forum powered by Invision Power Board. The database of our former website had been accidentally deleted, resulting in the loss of all 50,000+ posts, 2,000+ news articles, and over 2,000 registered users. The new forum was a success, and Great La became even more active than before.

GL2

Great La 2 or GL2 was launched on December 21st, 2007. Every version from GL2 was designed by Staircase. The name was given because it was basically a restarted version of Great La from the ground.

On February 2nd 2008, Great La updated to Great La 2.1.

GL 2.2

Because of the limitations of Invision Power Board, we decided to switch over to vBulletin on March 21st, 2008. This allowed us the flexibility to add more features for Deluxe Club members, to have a better warning system, and more detailed forum permissions.

In addition to the switch of forum software, we also changed our skin.

GL3

GL3 was launched on June 20th, 2008.

Along with the update, many new features were created (or brought back from our pre-GL2 days and improved). This update included the return of blogs, the addition of guides, and many updates/minor bug fixes to the rare values and news system!

GL3.1

Great La had a major facelift to shift our style back to Habbo with GL3.1. It was launched on October 24th, 2008. The site was primarily the same; the only changes were aesthetic.

GreatQuest

Our fighting game from our pre-GL2 days was brought back, but was recoded from scratch and thus was far better. Some new features included the addition of armor, potions, skills, MP, maps and many new monsters, a trading post, and many new weapons. The fighting interface was also revamped to it easier and faster to play the game.

An extension was later added to GreatQuest, called Create Your Own Adventure. Players can use the adventure editor to create text-based interactive stories.

GL4

On July 27th, 2009, Great La finally launched its new version, GL4. The delay between GL3 and GL4 was longer than any other version. Originally, GreatQuest was going to be a feature of GL4, but we decided to release the game early.

GL5

On June 26, 2010, GL5 was launched. This version held the most significant changes between any version since GL2, with many pages being redesigned or even completely recoded. It was a departure from our previous rigid three-column format. In addition to a new website, we also upgraded from vBulletin 3 to vBulletin 4.