A friend asked me today about a design firm that was very flamboyant at the peak of the bubble – Kioken Design. They were based in New York, and they did sites for J. Lo, Puff Daddy (as he was named at the time), and others (I would link, but the think the sites have changed in the intervening years).
CNN did a bit on them where it seemed all they did was sit around and play video games (the company was named after a move in some fighting game). They claimed that none of their designers made less than $100K.
Adobe did a piece on them, though it’s undated:
“If you poke your head into New York’s Kioken Design around 9 a.m., the only people you’re likely to find are the ones who have been up all night. In a dishevelled room full of PCs and empty Coke cans, you’ll stumble upon bleary-eyed staff members sitting enraptured in front of a wide-screen TV, locked in various stages of virtual combat as they frag their way through the video game ‘Street Fighter.'”
They were so cool, that I emailed the CNN article to the development group I was working with at the time as an example of what we should aspire to be one day.
Alas, Kioken appears to have gone away. kioken.com doesn’t respond, and I can’t find any recent information on them. Does anyone know what happened?