Pogo.com
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pogo.com is a popular gaming website, owned by Electronic Arts, that offers a variety of free casual games, from card and board games to puzzle, word, and sports games. The website is free, but a premium subscription-based service called "Club Pogo" also exists. America Online users are allowed to play some premium Club Pogo games without paying any membership fees.
Players can win jackpot prizes and tokens from playing the games on Pogo.com. Tokens can then be exchanged for tickets in Pogo.com's daily, weekly, or monthly prize drawings. Players can place bets of tokens on some games, such as Texas hold 'em poker and High Stakes poker. Cash and merchandise prizes are currently only available to US and Canadian residents, excluding Quebec.
Pogo also offers "Pogo To Go" Games, which are games that can be bought. You get a free 1-hour trial for each game before you have to purchase it.
Club Pogo is Pogo.com's premium subscription-based service. Perks to subscribers include: the ability to compete for badges visible in chat rooms, premium badges (animated flash badges), exclusive members-only rooms, no ad interruptions, emoticons, private chat, Pogo Minis (avatars), fast access, double jackpot spins and over 30 exclusive games.
Pogo.com's competitors for casual and social gamers include Yahoo! Games, Viacom's Neopets, Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates and TrayGames, among others.
[edit] History
The initial elements of the Pogo.com service had existed as part of the Optigon Interactive, a casual game service. Optigon was founded by Daniel Goldman and Janice Linden-Reed and launched the Total Entertainment Network in 1994. Optigon acquired Outland in 1995, another casual game services, in conjunction with accepting investment from Vinod Khosla. TEN relaunched in 1996 as more of a hardcore gamer service than one for casual games. In 1997, TEN began moving back towards the casual gamer. TEN built a large audience by offering co-branded browser-based games to many of the portals available in 1998. The Pogo.com brand was launched on September 2, 1999 with a handful of games, as part of TEN repositioning itself back to its earlier incarnation as a casual game service. Pogo grew quickly, eventually outpacing its competition to become the "stickiest games site on the Internet". Although the site was wildly popular by late 2000, the Dot-Com bubble was bursting for most startup companies, and cash was very tight. Pogo.com entered into a deal to be purchased by the (then) famous web portal Excite@Home Network, also a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers/Vinod Khosla investment. However Excite was having problems of its own and heading for bankruptcy(CNET news article).
In March 2001, Electronic Arts, a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers investment from the early 1980's, purchased Pogo.com for approximately $50 million, and began wrapping it into their own casual games offering. EA had previously struck a long-term deal with America Online to be the provider of games for the AOL games channel, but were having difficulty with the integration. Using engineers from both EA and Pogo.com, EA was able to meet its obligation to AOL and the service was launched in the fall of 2001.
[edit] Club Pogo
Club Pogo is an exclusive premium version of the Pogo.com website. Club Pogo does not include ads or intermissions, and players have the original Pogo games and brand new games exclusively for Club Pogo members to try out. People also have the choice to have "Minis" or Avatars of what they look like in real life. While playing games, the gamer can choose whether or not they want to challenge themselves by acquiring weekly challenges posted by Pogo. Club Pogo members can then play until the acquire the badge. Club Pogo users can choose to use the original Pogo rooms or the exclusive Members only rooms.
Club Pogo is a very strong and tight-knit community. Players can choose to chat and socialize while they play any of the Club Pogo games.
