Gamesville was a

casual gaming A casual game is a video game targeted at a mass market audience, as opposed to a hardcore game, which is targeted at hobbyist gamers. Casual games may exhibit any type of gameplay and genre. They generally involve simpler rules, shorter sessio ...

portal founded in 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts by Steven Kane, Stuart Roseman and John Furse. Gamesville was acquired in 1999 by Web portal

Lycos Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...

for $232 million in stock. Gamesville’s tagline was "Wasting your time since 1996".

History

Founded on a minimal capital base, Gamesville operated not just as a games provider but as a targeted marketing operation, offering free games and prizes to members as a way to attract large numbers of users while tailoring their proprietary games to meet the demands of advertisers. To play, members must provide demographic information; in turn, members would receive targeted ads based on the demographics provided. Gamesville pioneered the use of interstitial advertising as a method of monetizing game players. Gamesville's first game, The Bingo Zone, enabled hundreds of people to compete against one another in real time, for free, and win up to $20 by getting a

bingo Bingo or B-I-N-G-O may refer to: Arts and entertainment Gaming * Bingo, a game using a printed card of numbers ** Bingo (British version), a game using a printed card of 15 numbers on three lines; most commonly played in the UK and Ireland ** Bi ...

. Initially, Kane was skeptical of launching a free online bingo game because bingo is traditionally associated with the elderly rather than the prized demographics most advertisers seek. However, on the day Gamesville.com launched in April 1996, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about Gen Xers playing bingo in bars, and Kane is quoted as saying, "It was as if God had whispered to us." Over the years, additional free games with cash prizes were added, including card, trivia, puzzle, and several bingo variants. This approach attracted many visitors: In August 1999, Gamesville.com was the "stickiest" site on the Internet with

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

in second place.

Lycos

In November 1999, internet portal

announced that it would spend $270 million in stock to acquire Gamesville.com, which at that time had approximately 2.2 million registered users. Gamesville leveraged its relationship with Lycos to obtain the rights to produce the first (and to date, the only) online version of the popular television game show

The Price Is Right ''The Price Is Right'' is a television game show franchise created by Bob Stewart, originally produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman; currently it is produced and owned by Fremantle. The franchise centers on television game shows, but also inc ...

in 2002 although the license was dropped after one year. In 2002,

Monster.com Monster.com is a global employment website owned and operated by Monster Worldwide, Inc. It was created in 1999 through the merger of The Monster Board (TMB) and Online Career Centre (OCC). It is a subsidiary of Randstad Holding, a Dutch mult ...

profiled Gamesville's Rewards Manager, Josh Yeager, citing him as holding one of the Top 10 Coolest Jobs on the Internet. Yeager estimated that he sent out between 1,000 and 2,500 prize checks weekly, indicating that "some days I feel like the

Bob Barker Robert William Barker (born December 12, 1923) is an American retired television game show host. He is known for hosting CBS's ''The Price Is Right'' from 1972 to 2007, making it the longest-running daytime game show in North American televis ...

of the Internet, other days like Santa Claus himself." There is in fact more truth to this statement than at first glance, as Gamesville, for a brief time in 2002, had hosted the exclusive Internet game rights to

. Over the years, Gamesville developed several games without prizes including a multiplayer online version of

Spite and Malice Spite and Malice, also known as Cat and Mouse or Screw Your Neighbor, is a traditional card game for two or more players. It is a reworking of the late 19th century Continental game Crapette and is a form of competitive solitaire, with a number o ...

and an online version of

Spider Solitaire Spider is a type of patience game, and is one of the more popular two-deck solitaire games. The game originates in 1949, and its name comes from a spider's eight legs, referencing the eight foundation piles that must be filled to win the game. ...

. Drifting away from its focus on prizes caused the number of visitors to Gamesville.com to slowly but steadily decline.

Skilljam

In an attempt to reinvigorate the Gamesville site, Lycos entered into a year-long integration with Skilljam starting in 2006; purportedly the integration was designed to provide premium "best in class skill and casual free games for cash prizes, combined with exclusive games content not available anywhere else" to Gamesville players. However, instead, the integration with Skilljam only hastened the decline in traffic to Gamesville. In April 2007, Lycos issued a public apology, announcing an end to the Skilljam partnership and a promise to return the site to its roots. The relaunch of the site included new premium games from WorldWinner and new download games provided by

Oberon Media Oberon Media was a multi-platform casual games company, delivering casual games across online, social, mobile/Smartphone, interactive TV and retail categories. Oberon games were adopted by global digital and media companies, such as Acer, Micro ...

. A Tripod.com blog was also integrated into the site under the title "The Gamesville Blog". This blog is now powered by WordPress. After the relaunch of Gamesville, traffic to the site steadily increased, although not to its former heights.

Notable products

In March 2007, Gamesville launched Magic 21, a variant of blackjack, where multiple players compete to win a cash jackpot worth up to $4,999. The game is notable because it is the first proprietary jackpot game developed by Lycos/Gamesville since 2002's "The Price Is Right". In July 2007, Gamesville launched a new

avatar Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearanc ...

system enabling users to create 2D representations of themselves for use in Gamesville games. Gamesville currently holds "best avatar" contests in the Gamesville Blog. On May 28, 2008, Gamesville relaunched Bingo Zone with a new design, a chat game called Dickie's Bonus Balls, and progressive cash prizes.

Notable intellectual property

Gamesville has several trademarks and patents in its portfolio, most notably US Patent 6,012,984, “Systems for providing large arena games over computer networks”.

References