Holy crap, is anyone watching this documentary on SBS *right* now? It's bloody hilarious!!!
HOT DOCS: RIOT ON!
Broadcast Date: Tuesday 5 December 2006
Channel: Free to Air / SBS
Broadcast Time: 10.00 pm
Classifications: Other, MA (L,S,N) (R) (CC) WS
Timeslot Duration: 80 mins
Official title / weblink if available: HOT DOCS: RIOT ON!
This documentary exposes what happened when a group of young Finnish hopefuls attempted to become rich by creating a mobile phone entertainment company that would attract millions of dollars in investment from corporate giants worldwide.
The film also focuses on two people, Jan Wellmann - the charismatic messiah and main man behind the smoke and mirrors of the short-lived Riot Entertainment Ltd, and John Hakalax - his passionate disciple turned betrayer.
Interviews with the founders, former Riot employees, clients and former investors reveals how multi-million dollar mistakes, corporate con tricks and their over-the-top spending lead to the company's downfall. (From Finland, in English and Finnish, English subtitles)
It was unbelievable. I think this user comment on IMDb summarizes it pretty well:
[quote]Riot Entertainment (RIOT-E) was a Finnish mobile game company set to produce mobile games based on famous brands from movies like Lords of the Rings, Marvel Universe (X-men, Spiderman etc.), Bridget Jones Diary etc. What made their story unique that RIOT-E originally had just 6 Finnish guys with a Powerpoint show. They didn't have any products, technology etc., but they managed to get $21 million venture capital. All this money was spent on years 2000-2002, when the firm finally went bankrupt.[/quote]
Some funny things were: they had to ramp up employee numbers from a few to over 100 in around 5 months, so friends of employees were just hired.
Their mobile games were based on the simple the paper, scissor, and rock idea. They had to dump over half a years worth of infrastructure development when they realized that it had a serious design flaw which no one noticed. It simply wouldn't work (I think this was for their online game strategy which was some silly sms game).
During the end, they managed to get the Lord of the Rings license for $4 million (the way they did it was hilarious - they had a meeting with a representative and basically insulted the hell out of him ). But the company folded and the license reverted back to the ip holders. It was estimated to be worth $50 million though!
Oh, and they blew their money in all sorts of unbelievable ways (they had a sauna and fountain in the building, latest hardware technology and things for their employees which they didn't even need, expensive concord flights etc). There were some pretty crazy parties and other social activities as well.
If you see it around in a video store, I highly recommend picking it up . It's in a similar vein to that "Dot Com" documentary where some hopefuls start a website service company called Govworks where you can pay fines and things online. They secured millions in venture capital, and then things went bad to worse with all the internal political crap, launch delays and parts of the web application that wouldn't work, competition looming, and then the dot com bubble burst and eventually they ran out of money.
It was quite incredible wasn't it - I caught from the naked grecko wrestling story on, I couldn't look away, it was like watching a car crash in slow motion.