Pogo Games
Pogo.com (stylized as pogo) is a free online gaming website that offers over 50 casual games from brands like Hasbro and PopCap Games. It offers a variety of card and board games to puzzle, sports and word games. It is owned by Electronic Arts and is based in Redwood Shores, California.
The website is free due to advertising sponsorships but during a game, it produces commercials that can last up to 20 seconds. Players are strongly encouraged to sign up for Club Pogo, a subscription service. The enticement to do so is the offer of premium benefits and the omission of the advertisements that would otherwise interrupt the games. Games are played in a browser with the Java-plugin and more recently HTML5. Games load in a "room" allowing other players to join and chat.
Players can win tokens from playing the games on Pogo.com. Players can place bets of tokens on some games, such as Texas hold 'em poker and High Stakes poker. Cash (in the form of pre-paid credit cards) and merchandise prizes are available to U.S. and Canadian residents, excluding Quebec.
Pogo also offers downloadable games, often "deluxe" or "to go" versions of already-released games, which can be bought and played while offline. Some of these downloadable games include chat and tokens, similar to the original games.
Optigon Interactive launched a beta of the "Total Entertainment Network" in 1994. The T.E. Network, Inc, which became Pogo.com was created in 1995 from the merger of two predecessor companies, Optigon Interactive (founded by Daniel Goldman and Janice Linden-Reed) and Outland (founded by Dave King, Bill Lipa, and Alex Beltramo), in conjunction with investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led by partner Vinod Khosla. The original grand vision of the company was to become a hip, young version of CompuServe - a dial-up service for the MTV generation. Optigon had already launched a beta dial-in service along these lines with some simple games but also with other content. Much of the early hiring was therefore focused on editorial staff for content such as comics and music designed to appeal to that demographic and this was reflected in the grandiose name "Total Entertainment Network." The first major strategic change to come from the merger was not the decision to focus on games exclusively or even low latency games but rather the decision to abandon the dial-in model which was so successful for AOL and instead to create an internet-based service available to anyone with a TCP/IP connection.
