UGO Networks

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

~ the obit ~

ugo was a us gaming portal, the kind of thing you would land on through a hotlinked screenshot or a googled cheat code and then leave. in turkey the gaming web routed through donanimhaber and frmtr threads. the english-language portals i actually ended up on were gamespot and later destructoid. ugo was a name in the second tier of that constellation, less a destination than a banner-ad ecosystem with editorial wrapped around it.

the company itself started in april 1997 as unified gamers online, founded by chris sherman. it was a "network of professionally managed gaming sites" in the late-nineties webring tradition, monetized by selling banner space across the affiliated properties. in 1999 it renamed itself underground online and broadened its remit to entertainment-coded young-male content: movies, comics, video games, late-night humor. that pivot is what kept it alive long enough to get bought.

hearst corporation acquired the network on 24 july 2007, folding it into the interactive media arm beside esquire.com and cosmopolitan online. on 6 january 2009 ugo bought 1up.com from ziff davis, which had decided to shut down the print edition of electronic gaming monthly the same day. for a stretch in late '09 ugo was the largest single owner of english-language gaming editorial outside of ign.

ign acquired ugo from hearst in may 2011 as news corp prepared to spin the ign division off. the new ziff davis (a private-equity vehicle under j2 that had bought back the old name) then acquired ign in early '13 from the spun-out entity. on 21 february 2013, less than a month after the deal closed, the new owner announced that ugo.com would shut immediately, along with the 1up and gamespy domains.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the underground online pivot in 1999 was actually a sharp call. straight gaming sites in the late nineties depended on cpm rates that the dot-com crash was about to compress. ugo broadened into a young-male entertainment portal at almost the exact moment maxim and esquire were trying to do the same thing in print. hearst saw a digital fit with its print audience and paid an undisclosed price somewhere in the low hundreds of millions for the network in '07.

the 1up purchase two years later was the more interesting transaction. ziff davis was insolvent in the print sense by '08, and 1up was the only piece of its gaming editorial worth selling separately. the price was reported as low single-digit millions plus assumption of some print-related liabilities. for a publisher acquisition that took on a full editorial staff and a fully-rendered cms it was cheap, which is the tell that nobody else was bidding.

~ the slow ending ~

the ign integration in 2011 stripped ugo of its independent editorial budget. in those days. the site became a content-syndication node for ign properties through 2012, then went un-staffed in march of that year. for the next fifteen months ugo.com loaded as a redirect-heavy banner page, kept alive only to fulfill outstanding ad commitments. the 21 february 2013 shutdown was the formal close on a property that had not produced new editorial in a year.

the new ziff davis announced the closure as part of an ign-portfolio consolidation. the same press release killed 1up and gamespy. the ugo url redirected to ign.com for a few months, then stopped resolving altogether. neither hearst nor ign tried to keep the underground online name alive elsewhere; it had served its purpose as a hearst-to-news-corp asset transfer in 2011 and was effectively spent by the time ziff davis got the keys.

~ what survived ~

ugo's most durable artifact is the ugo e3 awards from 1998, which evolved into the game critics awards still given annually at e3. the awards survived the parent company by more than a decade because the participating-publisher panel structure had migrated outside the ugo organization long before the shutdown. the rest of the editorial archive disappeared into 404s. the 1up content was partially preserved by the 1up archive project on the wayback machine. ugo's own pages mostly were not.

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