Moorhuhn 3

Moorhuhn 3 is an online game developed by Phenomedia Publishing GMBH. It is more popularly known as the Crazy Chicken game. The game was released for public consumption on November 2001. However, this game was initially just a marketing campaign for a Scottish whiskey manufacturing company. Back then, the promoters have this game installed in their notebooks while going around Germany, letting the pub customers try it.  The game must have been shipped to some customers who won the game and from then, the game spread like wildfire around Germany. A research done in 2002 even noted that around 84% of Germans have played or knew of the game.

The Moorhuhn 3 gameplay is simple. The player controls the mouse which is displayed as crosshairs on the game interface. Chickens pop up all over the game and the goal is to train the crosshairs on them and shoot. Players have a time limit of 90 seconds or 1.5 minutes to shoot as many crazy chickens as they can. The remaining time is displayed on the upper left corner of the GUI. The current score is shown on the upper right corner. The game is so addictive that it was estimated that due to lost work time from excessive playing and shooting, companies have lost over 50 billion Euros per year.  An online championship was also held by BIld.de, a German boulevard newspaper, in cooperation with RTL, a German television station.