HotPrize

» see hotprize.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The reader who sent this in remembered it as HotPrizes.com, with an s, and the archive shows why the name is easy to get wrong. That domain was an empty or parked page for most of its life. The real site was HotPrize.com, singular, and it matches everything they described, from the flame over the logo to a prize list with sticky notes and pens at one end and a whole desktop computer at the other.

It was "a project of The Fysix Corporation", run from a mailbox address in Albany, New York, and it was online by October 1999 with the line "Play fun games and win hot, exciting prizes. It's free to play." The prizes came from sponsors, the FAQ explained, "much like TV game shows", and a big part of the income came from showing banners pulled from other servers. Some games were literally made of banners. Jigsaw scrambled one, and in Collector you caught its falling pieces and put it back together.

HotPrize was closed to me on two counts. The rules allowed players 18 and over in the US and Canada, minus Florida, Puerto Rico and Quebec, and in 1999 I was fifteen and in Turkey.

~ the case file ~

~ how the tokens worked ~

Most of the games were Java applets. The 2001 list had Betris, BreakOut and a two-player Double BreakOut with paddles, which is probably the pong our reader remembers, plus a Maze you steered with the arrow keys, Scratch Card, Pounding Heads and Banner Trivia. A win paid 4 tokens. There were three prize wheels, the cheapest spin cost 300 tokens with a top prize of $250, and the biggest cost 1200 for a shot at $1000. Winners got a verification number and then waited four to eight weeks for the mail.

Our reader also remembers a game where you drew lines with the arrow keys to shut a spider into a smaller and smaller box. I could not find it in the archived game lists, but those only cover some years, and the list kept growing until 2002, when tokens were replaced by tickets for prize drawings.

The prize page from mid-2000 lists "A stick-it note pad", pens with the HotPrize logo, T-shirts, a hide-a-key box, a mountain bike, a digital camera, Pizza Hut gift certificates, and at the top, "A New desktop Computer System!"

~ the one who won the computer ~

Our reader played for several months, won the PC, and was ecstatic. They wrote to us mostly to thank whoever ran the site, for "a little bit of happiness and distraction for a while". In their words, webmasters back then "actually were honest". At least in this case, the computer really did arrive.

~ monday, 13 november 2006 ~

The last normal front page in the archive is from 9 November 2006. By the 15th the page title was "HotPrize is closed", and the notice said: "HotPrize.com is no more! We're sad to announce that hotprize.com has been discontinued as of today, Monday 11/13/06. There is a very slim chance that HotPrize will be reborn..." It was signed "Your HotPrize Team" and gave no reason. It was not reborn, and from 2013 the domain was for sale.

credit to JLS, who won a computer here and wrote in to thank the people who ran it. we thank JLS back.

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