Five Nights At Freddy's

[clyde]

I haven't played the game, but I find the following kinda interesting.
 

I first heard about it on the Rebel FM podcast and didn't think it sounded very interesting. Then I remember hearing that the second game came out very soon after the first and that it was doing well sales-wise. None of that is especially interesting to me. Then I saw this pop up on Gamejolt's blog. It's a explanation of how they have decided to create a mandatory category that will be displayed on the front page of Gamejolt for all the Five Nights at Freddy's fangames. Apparently there are over 2000 of them (after further investigation, most of them don't have anything playable yet) and they were filling the hopper of new game-pages. So I got curious and tried to download and play some of these fangames. Thus far, this one seems the most of kinda what I guess Five Nights at Freddy's is kind of like? It's fun for me to corroborate inclusions in the fangames to piece together what Five NIghts at Freddy's is actually like. There is often a button for a door, a button for a light, a map with cameras that you can click to look in rooms and it always ends with some anthropomorphic animal screaming in your face. Then sometimes you will find a game like this one where someone has taken a shine to a particular character and just wants more. 

Eventually I got exhausted from searching through the many pages on Gamejolt where the game is announced and a screenshot is provided, but nothing is playable [edit: I just noticed that they are now default organized by "best" which shows the playable ones first, great move Gamejolt team!]. So I checked Youtube to see if anyone had played some of the fangames. There are over one million views of this fellow rating his top ten Five NIghts at Freddy's fangames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L4y9ADsJ8Q

 

What is going on? This person doesn't just make videos of his favorite Five Nights at Freddy's fangames, but also the top-ten pieces of fanart for the game, top-ten animatron... here I'll just screenshot his videos page to give you an idea.

 

I am old maybe? It doesn't matter. This is strange and interesting to me. 

[Merus]

I do kind of hope that it ends up being a Touhou kind of thing where the fan creations massively outstrip what the original creator can do. It's interesting to think that these are games that are designed so that the audience for the game aren't the players.

[clyde]

Someone pointed me to this article by Patricia Hernandez that includes an interesting developer bio.

http://kotaku.com/why-five-nights-at-freddys-is-so-popular-explained-1684275687

[miffy495]

Speaking from what I've seen, I think a lot of the success of the fangames is due to the younger fan base not having the money to buy the real thing. I teach fifth grade and my students are OBSESSED with FNAF. Like, to a really weird degree. They're too young to have a credit card or anything to buy the game with, so they go online for flash versions of it. Leave them alone at a computer for 10 minutes and they've found one. It's weird to me how much it's caught on with younger kids. From what I can tell, there are now two obsessions for tween gamers: Minecraft and FNAF.

[tegan]

I love the feel-good turnaround story of "guy makes unintentionally terrifying children's game and turns it into intentional horror game," and obviously a lot of people get a lot out of these games, but man... they're just super boring and dull to me, and as a horror series they're incredibly trite. It's literally a tedious office job with jump scares in it.

[Tanukitsune]

I don't know if it would be offensive to call it YouTube fodder, but to me it's the kind of game to watch others play. I do enjoy the lore and such, it's breeding a lot of good creepypastas?

[N1njaSquirrel]

I played this game for the first time this weekend.

 

I've always dismissed it as YouTube fodder like Tanukitsune, but actually it's really good at what it does, which is being scary. I think now that it's considered that because it's a horror game, and pretty much all horror games are enjoyable to watch other people play, so it's par for the course.

 

Honestly, I was really impressed with FNAF. Past the jump-scares, it actually does a really nice job of making it atmospherically creepy. Just sitting there in the unknown whilst creepy stuff are abound is really clever, I think, making you want to constantly look at your CCTV screen. Idk, it did a really good job of creeping me out. so much that I had to lighten the situation by singing "Big Generator" by Yes, which was amusingly apt.

[Merus]

Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Five Nights at Freddy's has been optioned by Warner Bros.

 

I have no idea how you'd adapt this in a way that'd be worthy of the effort. It seems like, no matter what they do, they're going to make something that's significantly lesser than the source.

[Eric]

The game itself seems like it was inspired by hacky 90s horror movies and tv shows in the first place