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Tuesday, 3 April 2007

Gamesville Through The Years

Topic: Members

Hi, everyone. We're on the verge of releasing the brand new Gamesville, so everyone at GV HQ is feeling excited and a little wistful, too. Before we go back to the future, I wanted to take a moment to look at where we've been so we can better understand where we're headed. Our first stop: 1997!

Gamesville.com, v1 

Here it is: the birth of Gamesville. We're not winning any design awards with this particular look--but it is the design that launched Gamesville and established the kind of retro, fun vibe that people have come to know and love...
 
Gamesville.com, v2 

I really like the design of this page, as well as the game icons and tag lines. Although, this look wasn't without its controversy; several people internally felt like we devoted an awful lot of space to that postcard graphic, space that would be better served promoting games. This design also introduces the "Panic" button, which lives on to this day inside our games.
 
Gamesville.com, v3 

Here is Gamesville, circa 1999, after the company was purchased by Lycos.com. Does anyone miss "Cash Cow"? If so, let me know; I have some ideas on how we could bring that "I Spy"-ish game back better than ever...
 
Gamesville.com, v4

In this version, we start adhering more to the established Lycos brand guide which works well for Lycos, but maybe not so much for Gamesville. I don't know if we ever publicly apologized for the Anna K Tennis Game; if we did, the apology still stands. Note: "Mouse Burglar" is another game I'd like to bring back with some new thinking and technology... 
 
Gamesville.com, v5 

This was an interesting period, circa 2000. We moved from a web-page-based game platform to our Java platform, which was a monumental undertaking.  This was also the part of our history where we launched the official online version of The Price Is Right, which was another tremendous effort; we were all very proud of the final result (except for the Plinko board; the motion of the Plinko chip never did seem quite right to me). 
 
Gamesville.com, v6 

In a lot of ways, this design was a watershed moment for Gamesville, reclaiming much of our fun and quirkiness and independence as a brand in the Lycos family. This was also a time of great expansion, introducing the GV Rewards loyalty program, the ability to track your favorite games, and the debut of some experimental games such as "Metarok" and "Spite & Malice".
 
Gamesville.com, v7

Lucky #7. Well, lucky #7 wasn't so lucky for anyone, really. Based on what you all have said so far, it seems like the eighth time will be the charm. More soon...

Posted by Chris Cummings at 9:40 PM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, 4 April 2007 9:44 AM EDT
Log in to Comment | View Comments (8) | Permalink

Wednesday, 4 April 2007 - 9:04 PM EDT

Gamesville member name: "Kam1212"
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Isn't it interesting that earlier this week I went to the waybackmachine website and was looking at the old gamesvile pages and here you had them all on your site..   I had forgotten what it looked like way back when I first started playing catch up coverall.

Kudo's on the new site design.  I miss the old cash cowand other treasure hunt games too. 

 

Thursday, 5 April 2007 - 8:10 AM EDT

Gamesville member name: "brookesmamaw"
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Love your new look!! I am totally hooked on lucky 21 plenty of my time is wasted now.

Thursday, 12 April 2007 - 2:36 AM EDT

Gamesville member name: "twolips93446"
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I love your new look as you've come a long way!!  Gr8T job!!  However, since the new homepage launched, I've been having issues w/all the games I usually play.  Just intermittent freezing or not responding.  I have re-downloaded the updated JAVA and am sure to clean up temp files etc, everytime I exit IE.  Aother change that I'd love to point out is the extension to the Miami Dice intermission timer.  Would LOVE for it to go back to the shorter time.  On the other hand when playing Magic 21, I got frustrated w/the amnt of time on it's intermission and was glad to see you had decreased it.  Sorry to whine, not all bad, you're doing an xclnt job!  LOVE your site, keep up the good work and as always, nothing is ever perfect and you cant please everyone but thank you so much for caring enough to ask for our feedback!!

Friday, 13 April 2007 - 4:04 AM EDT

Gamesville member name: "Dwayne713"
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Thank you for blocking out our personal e-mail address and I was very worried about this issue..Now I see it has been rectified and you now have another happy satisfied customer... I'm getting used to the new look and I have to admit it's getting better with each passing day..

Keep up the hard work.You won't b able to please all but it takes more time for some to adapt and adjust than others to different changes.

Wednesday, 18 April 2007 - 7:55 AM EDT

Gamesville member name: "nowgal"
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I love the Magic 21 game but the screen jumps all over the place when scores change.  Can this been fixed?

Friday, 27 April 2007 - 4:47 PM EDT

Gamesville member name: "Valerie"
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Whatever happened to The Price is Right Game anyway? Any chance of it coming back??

Saturday, 9 June 2007 - 11:06 PM EDT

Gamesville member name: "bgem0"
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I miss Pay Dirt, Dig for gold, just when I got my DSL line it went into thin air, boy was I mand.  Hope you guys will bring it back and a few other classic games as well. Oh and price is Right was a nice game. maybe that should return now that the legendary host is stepping down. Oh the memories of Gamesville back in 1999

Tuesday, 23 December 2008 - 9:11 AM EST

Gamesville member name: erik.alestra
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Hola!

Me gustan mucho los cambios, hasta la actual (casi 2009), ya que han ido evolucionando muy notablemente. Felicidades!

 2008-12-23

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