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The Origin of Five Nights at Freddy's
Five Nights at Freddy's is most likely the video game series you're sick and tired of hearing about. The franchise struck gold for whatever reason, possibly the incredibly vague lore or that it turned family friendly characters into murderous monsters! The game's origins lie very far from what we saw on Desura and Steam! Let's dive in!
Scott Cawthon, developer of the game, was working on a family friendly game called "Chipper and Sons Lumber Co." but the game received poor ratings. Reviewer Jim Sterling stated that the game was unintentionally scary with the main character looking like a creepy animatronic bear. Now we can see some direct parallels between Chipper and Sons and Five Nights at Freddy's, the main character of Chipper and Sons became the direct inspiration for Freddy, the titular animatronic! As you can probably understand Scott was devestated by his poor ratings he used the reviews as inspiration to make a horror game.
Five Nights at Freddy's may have very different origins to what we saw but even Scott has unusual origins on the gaming scene! Scott's earlier career in the video game industry was centred around christian-oriented games like Pilgrim's Progress. He is also credited for being a part of Hope Animations: a project of Christian animators aiming to spread the message of Jesus Christ. Seems somewhat different to the nightmarish world of the Five Nights at Freddy's series! As a brief digress from Five Nights at Freddy's religous games have been a part of video game history since the NES with Wisdom Tree, but to keep this being as religious as the Lavos post we'll save that for another time.
Five Nights at Freddy's exploded in popularity after its release on August the 8th 2014 and the latest entry on July 23rd 2015! Four games in 11 months! No wonder everyone is sick of hearing about the franchise! The games all focused on the same fundemental gameplay mechanics but each installment expanded the vague lore albeit by making it more vague! As for gameplay, while we're talking about the franchise we might as well discuss it! The point and click genre is one of the industries oldest and one which seemed to just die off! Five Nights at Freddy's brings the genre back with new life, with that the gameplay is incredibly simple to understand. The animatronics are walking the corridors and head in the direction of noise they hear, you are the night time security guard and it's your job to not get killed by them! You must check the cameras and follow their movements, sometimes wind a music box and seal the door when one tries to sneak in, or put on an animatronic head. You must survive five full nights at the restaurant or wherever else the series takes you!
The game was praised for its simplistic take on the horror genre, it found release on the PC and IOS and Android operating systems making it playable by almost everyone! Although the franchise may not have brought much to the table in terms of gameplay it has been an incredibly successful series which is set to has its own movie! At least the game has more movie making qualities going for it than the soon to be released Angry Birds film! It's strange to think that this series found its origins because Scott got a bad review!
