Phenomedia AG

» see phenomedia.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The bird came before the company that got rich on it. An agency called Vorwerk and Buchholz had the idea in 1997, a small Dutch studio named Witan built it, and the first public showing was at a demo party in 1998 under the title KippenSchieten. It was a whisky promotion. Johnnie Walker paid for a game where you shot at chickens against a countdown, and from October 1998 it sat on laptops set up in German bars.

Art Department, the Bochum agency that had commissioned the thing, was founded by Markus Scheer at 22. It spent a stretch inside the Funsoft group before buying itself back in 1997, then renamed itself Phenomedia and listed on the Neuer Markt late in 1999 for proceeds of around 22 million euros. Moorhuhn had gone out as a free download at the start of that year and did something nothing else in Germany was doing. The file was about 2 MB, which meant it fit in an email, and German office workers sent it to each other until newspapers began writing about the working hours it was eating.

By spring 2000 the market valued the company at about 400 million euros and the share had touched 90. The first two Moorhuhn games passed 18 million downloads by spring 2002. A sheep called Sven Bømwøllen, from the same house, took 900,000 downloads in its first week. Phenomedia owned studios as well: Greenwood Entertainment down the road in Bochum, and Piranha Bytes, who were busy making Gothic.

In April 2002 KPMG refused to certify the 2001 accounts. Scheer and the finance director Björn Denhard told the supervisory board that the figures had been manipulated, then reported themselves to the prosecutors and resigned in the middle of the month. On 14 May the company filed for insolvency at the district court in Bochum, and Wulf-Gerd Joneleit was brought in to hold it together. Proceedings opened on 1 August, the Neuer Markt dropped the listing that July, and the share finished its life at 85 cents.

The chicken traveled by attachment, and in Turkey an attachment was priced in minutes. Two megabytes took about eight minutes off a 33.6k line and the phone call was the part that cost money, so a free game was not free. The bird itself never reached me either way, being a German-language giveaway for a whisky brand moving through German office mail. What reached me from those years was the category, not the bird. Small executables that somebody handed you and that you ran without asking what they were.

~ the case file ~

~ what the audit found ~

Warth and Klein went through the books afterwards. Between 1999 and 2001 the company had lost 29.8 million euros against the 4.3 million it had reported. Revenue for 2001 came out at 17 million rather than the published 25.8 million. The method was ordinary enough: sales that had not happened, receivables for money nobody owed. BaFin added an insider trading allegation on top of that.

The 400 million euro valuation had been sitting on those numbers, and so had every private investor who bought the German internet company with the game everybody had played.

~ seven years to a verdict ~

The trial opened on 2 November 2004 and the Bochum regional court delivered its verdict on 13 February 2009, nearly seven years after the filing. Scheer got three years and ten months, Denhard three years, for falsifying the balance sheet and for credit fraud. Fifteen months were waived because the proceedings had run so long. Scheer's own summary, given in court, was that they had been playing a game. Monopoly, but with real money.

~ what outlived it ~

Ingo Mesche, who had drawn the chicken years earlier for a canceled Amiga game called Duckling, terminated his character license with immediate effect on 25 July 2002, which left the insolvent company briefly without clear title to the one asset anybody wanted. Piranha Bytes bought themselves out that September into a new entity called Pluto 13 and took Gothic with them.

The core business went on 1 July 2004 to a fresh vehicle, phenomedia publishing GmbH, backed by an investor group around ak tronic, with about 35 people left in it. That GmbH was wound up in 2017 and the franchise moved to ak tronic, which still sells Moorhuhn today. The AG that paid for all of it had been gone for fifteen years by then. phenomedia.de carries no address record at all now.

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