Chickens are the most common and most abused animals in videogames, but in 1993, an election for the British House of Commons featured the video game character "Alfred the Chicken" as one of the parties you could vote for. It got more votes than the "Rainbow Alliance Party" candidate at the time, but it lost to the "Buy the Daily Sport" party and the "Monster Raving Loony" party.
This reminds me of the Moorhuhn / Crazy Chicken franchise, which debuted in 1998. By 2000, Moorhuhn 2 was estimated to be costing the German economy as much as 135 million Marks per year (~69 million euros, according to xe.com) due to office workers playing the small, easily distributed download on company time.
However, inconsistencies in company financial reports alerted authorities to the fact that the company's sales, and therefore its share price, were being artificially inflated. This discovery led to a 4.5 year German court case and, in 2009, the Moorhuhn developer's CEO was sentenced to 3 years 10 months in prison, while the CFO got 3 years.
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Wait, wait, wait -- this actually sounds believable?
Indeed, good trivia, this one.
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Right! And part of what the CEO did next is also on that line of believable / unbelievable (but the topic is not very Steamgifts-y so I left it).
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