Uproar.com

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

~ the obituary ~

in 1999 i was fifteen, on a dial-up line at home in Turkey, and an American game show was not what my modem was for. Uproar.com wanted you to sit in a browser window and play Family Feud for prizes. the prizes wanted a US mailing address. that is roughly the whole distance between me and this one.

Uproar Inc ran out of New York with a development office in Budapest, which was an odd shape for a dot-com and turned out to be the reason it could ship so many small games so fast. the pitch was the game show without the studio. no host and no audience, just the format and a leaderboard, running in whatever browser you had.

what made it more than a free games page was the licensing. in July 2000 Uproar signed with Pearson Television for the online rights to a stack of real formats, Family Feud and Match Game among them, and later put Trivial Pursuit online too. for whatever reason nobody else had bothered to lock those up. so for about two years, if you wanted to play the actual named show rather than a knockoff of it, you came here.

the money arrived on 7 February 2001. Vivendi Universal, through its Flipside games unit, offered three dollars a share, a fifty percent premium on where the stock had been sitting, valuing the company around sixty million and putting another eighty million of cash into the business. call it a hundred and forty million total. the merged operation claimed fourteen million American players and told the press it would be profitable before the end of that year (close enough).

~ the case file ~

~ the license was the business ~

this happened in the english speaking web rather than where i was, but the structure is worth writing down. Uproar did not own a single one of its hit games. it rented them. the Pearson agreement was a development and licensing deal, which meant the most valuable thing on uproar.com belonged to a television company in London and could be taken back.

that works while somebody is paying the license fees. it stops working the moment the parent company decides online games are not a strategy anymore. an original property survives an owner losing interest. a rented one does not, and Uproar was almost entirely rented.

~ what really happened ~

Vivendi Universal spent 2002 falling apart, and in July 2003 it sold Flipside, Uproar included, to the Vendare Group. after that the trail stops being press releases and starts being the archive.

the archive is clear enough about the shape of it. at the start of 2006 uproar.com was still a real games site, bingo and solitaire stuffed into the meta tags, all the old plumbing underneath. by October of that year the same address served a red page with a logo and a search box on it, and nothing you could play. no announcement, no farewell note, no press. the games were there in January and gone by autumn.

~ the long tail ~

the domain kept going without the product for another five years, which is the part that reads strangely now. by 2008 uproar.com had been rebuilt as a Drupal site reviewing other people's online games, star ratings and all, wearing the name of the thing it was reviewing. in April 2011 even that stopped answering and the address started bouncing visitors somewhere else.

i saw none of this at the time and would not have looked. still, the formats outlived the site by a distance. Family Feud is on phones now, free to install, running the same loop Uproar was paying license fees for in 2000. the show was always the durable asset. Uproar was the tenant.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »