Phenomedia AG underwent insolvency proceedings. Scheer would subsequently leave the video game industry and turn to politics instead, allegedly becoming a puppet master of the far-right AfD party in North Rhine-Westphalia, until founding Bündnis Deutschland in 2022. In 2009, they were sentenced by a German court to 46 and 36 months' imprisonment, respectively, for securities fraud and other infractions. Chairman of the Vorstand Markus Scheer and CFO Björn Denhard, who confessed to the falsifications, were fired. In 2002, their stock value rapidly collapsed after it became known that the company's leaders were under investigation for falsifying balance sheets. The development studio and IP owner of the franchise went public in late 1999 at the height of the dot-com bubble and attained a market value of up to one billion Euro. It became wildly popular in German-speaking Europe, to the point of being described by various media outlets as a threat to the bottom line of businesses, on account of the number of hours wasted by employees playing the game due its ease of accessibility and shareability (the original game only had a file size of approximately 2 MB, meaning it could be sent via email). From the beginning of 1999 onwards, the game was officially made available for download by Art Department. The publisher's initial irritation at this subsided after the game received favorable mentions in popular media and demand for it grew. While never intended for sale or further distribution, it seems to have been illicitly copied, and became widely available for download on private websites. It was originally made available in October 1998 to play on laptops in select bars, with promoters dressed up as fowlers. A prototype of the game that would later be turned into The Original Crazy Chicken Hunt was shown off by Witan Studios at the Bizarre 98 demo party in summer of 1998 as KippenSchieten. The concept of using a video game to promote the Johnnie Walker brand was originally thought up by another advertising agency, Hamburg-based Vorwerk & Buchholz, in 1997. The original Crazy Chicken game (now distributed as The Original Crazy Chicken Hunt) was commissioned by Bochum-based Art Department advertising agency - known for their advergames - and developed by Dutch Witan Studios as an advertisement for Johnnie Walker whisky in 1998. While originally intended to merely serve as a small-scale advertising game, the first game's unintended online release and subsequent distribution as shareware were followed by an unprecedented surge in popularity, making it Germany's most popular computer game in the early 2000s and enabling Crazy Chicken to develop into a multi-platform franchise with a variety of spin-offs and merchandise. Crazy Chicken (originally released in Germany as Moorhuhn), sometimes known as Chicken Hunter or Moorhen, is a shooting gallery video game franchise.
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