Where has the time gone?!? Burger King’s Subsurviant Chicken turns 5 today.

Five years ago today, a bunch of youngsters at two companies called The Barbarian Group and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky launched a small minisite three days in advance of the late night running of some broadcast spots. They wanted to iron out any last minute wrinkles in the site by emailing it around to a few more friends, and get a little early buzz before the spots ran.

In the next 48 hours, before the spots even had a chance to air, the little viral site that could had already bombarded the poor XServe in Crispin’s internal data center with 25 million hits. Within days, a cultural phenomenon was spawned.

All for a creepy dude in a chicken suit with garters, who looked like he was running some sort of shady web cam operation.

Here is blog post detailing the conception of this Internet and pop culture icon (get a cup of tea, it’s a long one).