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. 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.^[3] 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.

It was originally made available in October 1998 to play on laptops in select bars, with promoters dressed up as fowlers.^[3] While never intended for sale or further distribution, it seems to have been illicitly copied, and became widely available for download on private websites.^[3] The publisher's initial irritation at this subsided after the game received favorable mentions in popular media and demand for it grew. From the beginning of 1999 onwards, the game was officially made available for download by Art Department.^[3] 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).^[4]

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.^[5]

In 2002, their stock value rapidly collapsed after it became known that the company's leaders were under investigation for falsifying balance sheets.^[1] Chairman of the Vorstand Markus Scheer and CFO Björn Denhard, who confessed to the falsifications,^[6] were fired.^[1] In 2009, they were sentenced by a German court to 46 and 36 months' imprisonment, respectively, for securities fraud and other infractions.^[5] 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.^[7]

Phenomedia AG underwent insolvency proceedings. Its assets, including the Crazy Chicken series, were bought by a successor company, Phenomedia publishing GmbH, which continued to develop and publish games^[5] until its dissolution in 2017, from whereon out the company's assets - including the rights to the Crazy Chicken franchise - became property of its long-time publishing partner, ak tronic Software & Services GmbH.^[8]