Five Nights at Freddy’s

Video Game News

Halloween is creeping around the corner! The cool air, spooky music, and top-notch horror movies are all waking from their coffins. But so are the video games. This article will be doing a retrospective on the well-known indie horror game, Five Nights at Freddy’s.  

Scott Cawthon, the creator of the game, was born on June 4th, 1978. He is a father and a husband, as well as a devout Christian. He started his career in game development and design in the 1990s but did not make his first official game until the 2000s. In 2013, Scott released Chipper and Sons Lumber Co. The game was heavily criticized for having characters that moved like “animatronic machines”. This discouraged Scott, and he nearly quit developing all together, but he used these criticisms as building blocks for his next game.  

On its release, August 8th, 2014, the game was almost immediately a hit. What really pushed the video game to the top charts were the many Let’s Plays that were published. Such as YouTube creator Markiplier, whose video is currently at over 100 million views. Five Night’s at Freddy’s is a point and click horror survival game, where you start at 12am and try to survive till 6am. The player is put into the position of a nightguard whose job is to watch over a Chuck E. Cheese-like establishment. Every night starts with a phone call, from a man fans call “Phone Guy,” instructing the player on how the game works, and even giving peeks into the game’s plot. As the night goes on, the player learns the animatronic robots are haunted and are out for blood, and you are on their menu. 

 FNaF (a common abbreviation of the game’s title) has a reputation of having very convoluted lore to its series. YouTube creator “MatPat” is known for tacking this beast of a story and breaking it down into an understandable timeline. For the first installment, the story goes that the player goes by Mike Schmidt and signed up for a job at “Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.” The animatronics are haunted by spirits of children and if you lose, you will be stuffed into an animatronic suit. During the play through of the game, there are many hints to the lore throughout it. Sometimes the screen will flicker to a spooky image, or the posters in some cameras will change. There is even a hidden ghostly character, the character is a golden recolor of Freddy, which was named Golden Freddy by the community. At the time of the first release, not much was known about this ghost’s origins. 

 The most recent installment in this spooky franchise was released last December and has been going strong since! The series has been going on for 8 years and has a loyal fanbase. If you ever have free time, search up a playthrough of this indie game and enjoy some cheesy scares!