Tahd Frentzel Portfolio

One of my favorite/not-so-favorite stories from my pogo.com days is when we worked out a charity benefit with Rosie O’Donnell’s For All Kids Foundation.

It was pretty simple – players would play Tumble Bees during a week in May of 2007 to enter a contest where players could be selected to have a live chat with Rosie herself, and EA, on behalf of Pogo, would donate $30,000 to the All Kids Foundation.

If you’re an absurdist, the timing could not possibly have been better. If you were working at Pogo at the time, it could not have been worse. Rumors amongst my coworkers were that this is when I started to go bald.

We announced the campaign, and players seemed to be okay with it. Many of our players were from the midwest or the south, and weren’t all that keen on Rosie at the time, as she was a co-host on The View and leaned pretty liberal. Well… for a short time, anyway.

It was during this time that she and Donald Trump were in a war of words, after she’d poked fun at his hairline. Then Rosie said on The View: “655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?” and suddenly, Rosie wasn’t just an annoying host anymore. She was a traitor to the country, calling our troops “terrorists.” It was a misunderstanding of what she meant, no doubt, but the wheels were in motion, and she suddenly became kryptonite.

As I ran the weekly “Letters to the Editor” column, my Editor box became full to the brim with angry players demanding we end our association with her and focus on what’s important. I worked with our leadership to move our focus from Rosie herself, to the All Kids Foundation. Not sure that helped much.

Behind the scenes, we’d been talking to Rosie and her people about developing a TV gameshow based on one of Pogo’s games, and getting ready to make a big announcement on The View. We had hundreds of backpacks created, full of Pogo swag, to give to each audience member during that episode.

In May, during our For All Kids promotion, Rosie decided to leave the show, citing contract disputes, and a desire to focus on her family. Whether or not the upcoming Pogo Game Show had anything to do with it, we’ll never know.

But then, on May 23rd, the last day the people could enter the “Chat with Rosie” contest, she had a split-screen epic argument with co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck and walked off the set. Then she asked that they end her contract early. They agreed.

So, we had a bunch of backpacks filled with Pogo stuff, and a promise to our players that we’d have a live chat with her. We did! I was the moderator of this event, and it was a lot of fun. We had an employee at her house making sure everything worked out from that end, and he reported that she was incredibly nice, and hilariously funny. Those who attended the live chat were fans, thankfully. I had three execs behind me watching the entire time, and I’m happy to say that the event went very well.

After that, EA and Pogo decided not to move forward with the game show, and a very sad Rosie wrote on her blog: “Pogo says ‘no no’ to Ro Ro.” That line was repeated for humor sake around the office for weeks.