With the release of its second movie just this month, Five Nights at Freddy’s, or FNAF, is a series that has a lot of attention right now. However, if you’re an outsider looking in, you may not realize the games had been huge in the world of indie games for the time in 2014. But, if you want to know why you have to start at the beginning of it all.
The first FNAF game every project created has in most part been created by only one man named Scott Cawthon. Cawthon had been aspiring to be a game developer full time for his life. He had created many games beforehand to no real success. On the side of making games, Cawthon was working at Dollar General for stable income. It was only until his final game before FNAF, Chipper & Son’s Lumber Co., received a negative review from a critic stating that the characters featured looked like creepy animals. This review inspired Cawthon to lean into the idea and in early 2014 he had started working on the horror game known as Five Nights at Freddy’s. FNAF 1 was released on August 8th, 2014. FNAF in every way for that time was something that was never seen in anything previously done before it. At that time, creepypastas ,a form of internet horror stories, were a huge thing in the world of gaming and turning those stories into games. The most popular game to come out of that era was Slenderman. But still, a horror game where you stay in the same place and have to survive for a certain amount of hours was something unheard of in the gaming space. Besides getting popular for its new mechanics, YouTube gaming only was growing more huge and because FNAF wasn’t a gory/violent game in play through, it was the perfect game to appeal to any real audience into horror. Eventually, FNAF would tend to lean more and more into the kids demographic. Besides all of that though, the thing that most people know about FNAF more and still are trying to get a grasp on today is the real story being told. This first game, even at that time, had many speculations of what was really happening in this pizzeria. The game left just enough for people to chew on and wonder while playing and just from that it has spiraled into the hundreds if not thousands of timelines and stories of who or what the main game series is about.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is now a series with 12 games, 53 books, and 2 movies. FNAF was Cawthons’ last attempt at being a game developer and now it is not only a series but a series that has changed his and many people’s lives. Many people have grown up with this and the games to come after. The entire landscape of indie horror games had changed drastically just from this game. That doesn’t even include the amount of fan games to come out after FNAF with game developers taking the main gameplay aspects of the original and making it their own. Overall, we may never see a game have as big of an impact as FNAF. However, we will always know the ripple effect of the game for itself and the gaming industry as a whole.
