Pogo.com is a 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.
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 began life on September 2, 1999 with a handful of games, after existing previously as part of the Total Entertainment Network (TEN). 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, however the terms of the deal Excite struck ended up being very poor for them by the time the year 2001 rolled around (Pogo would have ended up owning about 1/3 of Excite based on the terms of the deal). Excite then terminated that deal, leaving Pogo.com in the lurch.
In March 2001, Electronic Arts 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.