Five Nights at Freddy's (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Five Nights at Freddy's, released in 2014 by Scott Cawthon, ends with its hero getting fired. Night guard Mike Schmidt has just survived a custom seventh night, where the player sets how aggressive the hostile animatronics will be. Then comes the dismissal.

  That odd reward sits at the heart of a game built by one man and set in a family pizzeria. It frightened critics and launched a franchise that grew far beyond its small beginnings.

  Several questions run underneath it. Why did a developer of Christian adventure games turn to horror? What does a player actually do during a shift? Why did reviewers praise the same game for its terror and fault it for repeating itself? And how did an online audience come to treat its story as a puzzle to be solved?

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• 2. A Shift in the Dark

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  Midnight to 6:00 a.m. is the span of every shift at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and the player spends it defenseless in an office. Mike Schmidt has no weapon. What he does have is a network of security cameras showing different rooms of the restaurant. The feeds let the player follow four animatronic characters, each with its own distinct behavior, though most of their movement happens off-screen.

  Two lights can illuminate the hallways to the left and right of the office. When a light reveals an animatronic, the player can close a set of steel doors to keep it out. If one gets inside, it attacks and kills the player, and the game is over.

  Everything costs electricity. Cameras, doors and lights all draw on a limited power supply. When it is exhausted, the cameras stop working, the doors open and the lights go out. Then Freddy Fazbear himself appears, playing the "Toreador Song". The player loses unless the shift ends before he can strike.

  The game is divided into levels called nights, and each lasts roughly ten minutes of real time. The main game has six levels, made up of five main nights and an extra sixth. Every completed night makes the animatronics more aggressive, so saving power gets harder just as it matters most.

  Between the frights, a recorded voice on the office phone explains why any of this is happening.

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• 3. Messages From the Previous Guard

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  On Schmidt's first night, a voicemail plays from his unnamed predecessor, and similar messages follow on later nights. The caller explains that Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy can roam after dark because their servomotors lock up if they are left off for too long. He warns that an animatronic meeting a human after hours will mistake the person for a bare endoskeleton. It will then push the human into a spare mechanical suit, which kills them.

  The restaurant's history arrives sideways, in fragments. One voicemail mentions "The Bite of '87", an incident implied to have cost a person their frontal lobe. It also led to a ban on animatronics moving about during the day.

  Newspaper clippings visible through the camera feeds report that a man lured five children into a back room and killed them. The suspect was arrested, yet the children's bodies were never found. Later, customers complained that the animatronics smelled foul, and that blood and mucus leaked from their eyes and mouths.

  By the fourth night, the message suggests the predecessor was killed by an animatronic while recording it. The fifth night's message is nothing but garbled sound. Schmidt, at least, collects a paycheck after both the fifth and the sixth nights.

  The man who put this story together had reached it by an unlikely route, after a run of games that did not sell.

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• 4. A Developer in Crisis

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  Several adventure games aimed at Christian audiences came out of Scott Cawthon's studio, and every one of them under-performed commercially. By the 2010s those failures had pushed him into a crisis of faith, and he lost interest in making games. A spiritual experience brought the interest back. It also left him less inclined to make Christian titles, so he began work on a secular project, Five Nights at Freddy's.

  The immediate spark was another failure. His construction and management game, Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., received negative reviews. Players remarked that some of its characters looked unintentionally unsettling, almost like animatronics. Reviewer James Stephanie Sterling used the word "terrifying".

  Cawthon was discouraged at first. He then decided that if his characters frightened people by accident, he could do it on purpose, and he chose a horror game for his next release.

  For the look of his homicidal animatronics, he drew on the mascots found at Chuck E. Cheese party venues.

  The game that followed took six months, and almost nobody besides Cawthon worked on it.

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• 5. Built by One Man

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  His sons and friends served as beta testers, and that was the extent of the outside help. Cawthon wrote the game in the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 engine and modeled its 3D graphics in Autodesk 3ds Max. For the sound, he combined effects he created himself with files bought from the internet.

  Release came in stages. The Windows version reached the Desura distribution platform on the 8th of August 2014, and Steam followed on the 18th of August. An Android version launched on the 26th of August.

  The iOS port arrived on the 11th of September, and Windows Phone received the game on the 1st of December. Versions for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One appeared on the 29th of November 2019.

  Once the game was in players' hands, critics had to decide whether something this simple could truly frighten anyone.

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• 6. The Sound of Fear

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  Metacritic summed up the critical response with the phrase "generally favorable reviews". Gamezebo called the game a "brilliant horror experience" that drew its power from fear of the unknown. GameSpot liked that it created dread without any graphic violence. The reviewer at GameRevolution went further, naming it the most terrifying game he had ever played.

  Sound earned some of the loudest praise, and much of it concerned silence. GameSpot noted that no music plays during the game, so the quiet becomes panic-inducing whenever the animatronics make a noise. GameRevolution also found the silence unnerving and said the random sounds kept the tension high.

  Gamezebo called the sound design excellent and recommended headphones. They improve the experience, and they also help a player hear the animatronics approaching.

  The mechanics drew compliments too. PC Gamer said a simple premise combined into a frightful experience, and GameRevolution agreed. Nintendo Life found the controls easy to grasp and liked that the tense mood was clear from the start.

  Not every reviewer thought those controls could carry a game on their own.

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• 7. Fear Versus Repetition

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  TouchArcade described the controls as little more than "a game of red-light, green-light". Its reviewer added that the gameplay would feel lacking for anyone the atmosphere failed to scare. PC Gamer made a related point. Once a player has memorized how the animatronics behave, some will find nothing of interest beyond the ambience.

  Critics also argued about what kind of horror this was. TouchArcade said the game forces players to face their own paranoia, and that they lose if they give in to fear. Nintendo Life credited the atmosphere and the lack of defensive tools for a compelling sense of dread.

  PC Gamer argued that the game stands apart from the rest of its genre by relying on the possibility of a jumpscare rather than on the scares themselves. Other reviewers disagreed and found it too dependent on jumpscares, which work at first and grow repetitive.

  Nintendo Life concluded that the reliance on scares and simple controls left little replay value. Even TouchArcade, which found repeat playthroughs monotonous, said the game built the atmosphere it intended.

  Its largest audience would turn out to be watching on YouTube rather than reading reviews.

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• 8. The Let's Play Effect

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  By 2015, Five Nights at Freddy's had become one of the most uploaded video games on YouTube. Let's Play videos, in which creators film themselves playing, fueled its popularity. Influencers such as Markiplier, Jacksepticeye and PewDiePie featured it. The game became a financial success and gathered a large following.

  A sequel, Five Nights at Freddy's 2, began a media franchise. Books followed, starting with the 2015 novel Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes.

  In 2017, Blumhouse Productions acquired the rights to a film adaptation. After several delays, filming began in 2023. The film opened in theaters and on Peacock on the 27th of October 2023.

  Cawthon himself stepped back in 2021, retiring from game development amid controversy over his donations to Republican Party politicians. He intends to hand over management of the franchise at a later date.

  Meanwhile, fans had spent years building their own explanations for the gaps in the story.

  Social media, fan creations and wikis became the places where fans examined and debated the franchise's complicated narrative. Cawthon occasionally commented on theories, including one presented by the YouTuber MatPat. He also stayed in touch with the community, talking with fans through his website, the official website and the Steam forums. The fan community remains an influential subculture on TikTok and YouTube.

  Fangames multiplied just as quickly. On the publishing platform Game Jolt, they became so numerous that the site had to create an entire video game category for the franchise and its imitations.

  Polygon later wrote that part of the fanbase had come to be connected mainly through fangame adaptations rather than the main franchise. Some of those fans chose to play imitations instead of supporting Cawthon.

  Musicians joined in as well, writing songs around the lore. The Living Tombstone wrote the first song it based on the series, and that track plays over the closing credits of the film adaptation.

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