Pogo

Pogo is a gaming website with over 50 casual games from brands like Hasbro and PopCap Games. It offers a variety of card and board games like First Class Solitaire and Monopoly to puzzle, sports and word games like Scrabble.
Games are played in-browser with Java, Flash and more recently HTML5. Flash games have been removed however since the plug-in's end of life."Flash games on Pogo are going away". EA Help. December 22, 2020. Games load in a "room" allowing other players to join and chat. Pogo also offers downloadable games (often "deluxe" or "to go" versions of already-released titles) which can be bought and played offline.
In the mid-2000s Pogo consistently ranked as a top 10 website in the U.S. for time spent online."Top-20 Websites: Where DO we spend our time online?". Compete.com Blog. January 25, 2007."Internet Allstars ‘01: Where are they now?". Compete.com Blog. October 1, 2007.
==History==
===Total Entertainment Network===
Optigon Interactive launched a beta of the "Total Entertainment Network" (TEN) in 1994. A dial-up service, it offered games, comics, email, news and other features at $9.95 for 5 hours of access, then $2.95 for every subsequent hour."Showdown at the Virtual Corral". San Francisco Chronicle. January 5, 1995.
TEN abandoned the dial-up model in 1996 for a service that focused on providing low latency online modes for games. Entering partnerships with major game developers, they offered Americans the first way to play popular games with people across the country."TEN Goes Live". Next Generation (December 1996). No. 24. Imagine Media. p. 28. An immediate success, its initial flagship game was Duke Nukem 3D, and DarkSun also found a following."3D Realms Titles Go Exclusively to TEN for 5 Years; TEN to be exclusive online partner for all upcoming titles, including Duke Nukem 3D". Business Wire. March 19, 1996. Ultimately the most popular title would be NASCAR Racing Online, with a peak of about 1,700 people playing simultaneously.
After the success of Diablo's free online service in 1997, publishers began incorporating free online directly in their games. This effectively killed TEN's business which, despite having over 25,000 subscribers, never turned a profit."History of the Total Entertainment Network Gaming Service" - TEN.net"Joyriding". Next Generation. (August 1997) No. 32. Imagine Media. p. 26.
===Pogo===
As internet advertising was starting to gain traction, the company shifted to easy-to-play browser games that would appeal to a broad audience and attract enough users to sustain a business. TEN acquired WebDeck to accelerate this transition, which offered Java versions of Euchre, Spades and Hearts that could run in popular web browsers.
In July 1998, the company launched the website as "Excite Games by TEN" and built a large audience by offering co-branded games compared to other portals at the time. The site rebranded to "pogo.com" in 1999."TEN Becomes pogo.com: Bingo Beats Quake". Wall Street Journal. October 1999. Pogo grew quickly, eventually outpacing competition to become the "stickiest game site on the internet" according to a company press release."pogo.com Celebrates 5 Millionth Member As Online Games Go Mainstream". Marketwire. December 1999.
Although the site was popular by 2000, the Dot-com bubble caused cash to be tight. Electronic Arts ultimately purchased Pogo in 2001 for $40 million."Electronic Arts’ biggest acquisitions: the good, the so-so, and the duds". VentureBeat. December 20, 2017.
The site's subscription service Club Pogo launched in 2003. Perks to subscribers include exclusive games, private chats, no ads, emoticons, avatars and access to full content in-game. 
Pogo launched apps on Facebook, iOS and Android in 2010 that included some of their games. All versions were free but featured ads, which could be removed by subscribing to Club Pogo. The apps were discontinued at the end of 2019."Service Update: Pogo Mobile App". Pogo. December 12, 2019.
==Jiggmin==
Pogo sponsored Jiggmin and aeiowu's game Effing Hail. Notably, the game was the only one out of a series of small games the pair developed in January 2009 that received a sponsorship. One (The Great Red Herring Chase) eventually saw a limited release on their websites in July 2009, while the others (Inkclipse/A Murder in Crowland) were never released.
Pogo's sponsorship was considered unusual among the site's community, to the point their editor answered a question on where it came from:
"Your confusion is understood. We didn't promote it, it has no chat, you don't win tokens, and it just sort of "showed up" on the list of games.
Basically, it's the first of what we expect to be several new Pogo games written in Flash technology. We always want to offer players fun games with some humor, and we thought this game excelled at both.""BOGGLE-Mania, Maple Leafed Homepage, Effing Hail, Manly Editors and More!". Pogo. July 1, 2009.
Pogo attracted a brief controversy in July 2009 when Jiggmin revealed they had only paid half of what they agreed to in-exchange for sponsorship, so he and aeiowu were considering legal action."Pogo.com - they are punks". Jiggmin. July 5, 2009. However Pogo soon paid the other half within the following days and apologized for being late."Pogo.com". Jiggmin. July 8, 2009.
==References==
Category:Websites