and 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 1, 1999, and the company renamed itself to Pogo.com. Pogo grew quickly, eventually outpacing its competition to become the "stickiest game site on the Internet." according to a company press release. Although the site was 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 then popular 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. When AT&T took control of the Excite@Home board, they aborted the acquisition. The Electronic Arts acquisition In March 2001, Electronic Arts (EA) purchased Pogo.com for approximately $40 million. Some of their distributions partners included Excite, WebCrawler, Netscape's Netcenter, Prodigy, Geocities, CNET, Snap.com, Road Runner, Go, @Home Network, AltaVista, Sony Station, XOOM, and iVillage. Club Pogo Launched in 2003, Club Pogo is Pogo.com's premium subscription-based service. Perks to subscribers include exclusive members-only rooms, no ad interruptions, graphic emoticons (smileys) (discontinued), private chat, "Pogo Minis" (avatars) (which later became available to free Pogo members), double jackpot spins (discontinued), and access to full content in-game. Exclusive Club Pogo games include Jungle Gin, Canasta, Bookworm, Pogo Addiction Solitaire, Tri-Peaks Solitaire and Crazy Cakes 2. Club Pogo members can also earn Badges by completing challenges in various games. There are several types of badges, including weekly badges, personal challenges and Premium badges (that can be purchased for an additional cost). In addition to this, subscribers also get access to site wide events and the new Seasons that grant you Pogis (points) for the specific challenges you complete. Most of the new games Pogo features require players to buy (with gems purchased with the player's money) powerups in order to progress faster. Club Pogo UK On September 25, 2007, Pogo launched Club Pogo UK. Pogo members in the UK are now able to purchase Pogo Gems, Mix-n-Match badges and Premium Mini items and win other prizes in British currency (£), whereas previously they were unobtainable, though this fact was never made clear by Pogo games until now. UK players are still unable to gain access to some parts of Pogo, such as Scrabble for example. Members of Club Pogo in the UK