The Rise of Five Nights At Freddy’s

Growing up in the mid-to-late-2010s, one thing was evident to me: Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) had a chokehold on my generation. As my peers and I got older, that chokehold remained, and it eventually started to bleed over to younger audiences. Nearly 10 years after its initial release, what was once an indie horror game has become a cultural phenomenon. Examples can be seen everywhere, with Universal Studios adapting the franchise into a maze for Horror Nights or Blumhouse’s movie adaptation. But how it reached cultural ubiquity requires a deeper look at the series.

Five Nights at Freddy’s initial and obvious inspiration is from the children’s dine-and-play restaurant, Chuck E. Cheese, which was known for having animatronics that would dance and sing for kids to enjoy. As fun as these animatronics are, they have an inherent creepiness because of how robotic and unlife-like they appear to be at times. Five Nights at Freddy’s took the idea of animatronics becoming alive, if strange, and it cranked that innate fear up to 11. The best way to describe this is by letting the voice of Freddy Fazbear, Kellen Goff, explain it.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s is [a ShowBiz Pizza Place or Chuck E. Cheese], but at night, they come to life and try to kill you. So you basically have to try and survive that,” Goff says, summarizing the FNAF appeal.