The Blog for the Sports Gamer

I just took a look over at Operation Sports, I see they’ve now gone “ice” as GameSpot says….it looks more forum oriented, so I guess that’s good. From a professional standpoint I think it’s nice. From a personal standpoint, I see the “UGO” banners and I want to vomit. As you know, UGO was a prior employer for myself and Bill before that. They own the GamePen.com domain.

At the end of my tenure there, let’s just say I was treated like shit. They let a great domain name die and merge into the black hole of advertising that was UGO.com. When Craig and I ran Operation Sports, UGO gave us our first paycheck, ironically when John Cauthen and Digital Sportspage left the UGO network, they swooped in and allowed us to run ad banners for a guaranteed minimum of $300 per month. Granted, I’d kill to get that now. We were on top of the world. They also paid for hosting. Of course, they pulled that pretty quick as traffic increased, making Craig pretty much find a new host daily. It was funny — everytime he went to find a new host with ‘UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH” they would close us down because of our bandwidth.

Even then the agreement wasn’t that great. However, I left OS to start with GamePen. GamePen.com the domain is a UGO property and I knew up front that I would be running it but not own it. I figured it was worth the risk because the brand name had some stature. And it did, at the time, I remember going to E3 2000 with Scott Bedard from GameRankings. It was funny because everyone knew GamePen.com but no one knew GameRankings. Back then, Scott and I had to share a room at the Hollywood Motel 6. Now Scott could buy his own Motel 6. Bastard.

Luckily I’m not bitter. After all, our blog gets more traffic than the GameSpot blog. Nyah Nyah. Of course, I just made that up. I have no idea about the Gamespot traffic.

What the hell was I talking about anyway? Oh UGO. That’s right. All I remember is being told our monthly payment was getting cut back to like $2.36 a month so that Gary Coleman could be paid more. I’m just speculating the money went to Gary. Seroiusly, that was during the internet crash and understandable..but it’s still a shame they killed that domain.

Let’s take a moment to remember all of those wonderful domains that are now dead:
AGN3d.com
gamepen.com
pcsportsgames.com
ga-sports.com
3dfiles.com
3dnews.net
gamecenter.com
pcsportsdaily.com
pcsportsupdate.com
gamehut.com
hothornyamateurs.com

oh wait, how did that last one get in there. I think that was one of Craig’s bookmarks….

Okay, I’m done with memory lane now. Sorry about that. Just had to write something, and it’s partially my blog, dammit.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 25th, 2005 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.