Five Nights at Freddy’s or FNAF as it’s highly known as is a popular indie horror game created by Scott Cawthon. He got the idea when Chuck-E-Cheese created its highly creepy animal animatronics that were inspired from Disney’s more “kid friendly” robots. Then an idea popped into Scott’s head, he should make a horror game based around these terrifying monstrosities. Scott than got to coding this game and made 4 completely new games. The world had never seen anything like it before and everyone wanted to play. Scott saw how popular his game had become and later got a game company to help him create bigger and better games, this is where Steel Wool Games comes into play. They teamed up with Scott and created three new games. FNAF AR (A mobile AR game), FNAF VR HELP WANTED (A VR game based along the FNAF universe) and the newest game: FNAF SECURITY BREACH (An open world FNAF game). All of these games were hits along with community and ever since then Scott’s been working with them, but not always with the game, with the lore and story line of this heavily interesting game series.

The first 4 games are based around the same game play mechanics though. You’re a security guard who works for a pizzeria with a group of animatronics (Freddy, Chica, Bonnie, and Foxy). Every single night at 12 pm the robots come alive and have an incentive to kill you. Using the security cameras and doors you must survive until 6 am without getting killed by the animatronics. You have to survive five nights of this (Hence in the title) with each night getting progressively harder without going to 0% power. The game itself is not scary but contains jump scares which scare you because you don’t usually expect it. The games are available on Steam and other consoles for $5-20 but you can usually find a free browser website version of the games.

There are about 5 main games in the series which have about the same game mechanics until Security Breach. FNAF 1,2,3 and 4 all have the same 5 nights mechanic where there are new enemies each game. These games were all distributed by Scott Cawthon and not Steel Wool Games until Security Breach which was an open world horror type game where you have to survive until 6 AM to escape the pizzeria. Along with the first 5 games a long range of chapter books have been released alongside with some spin off stories and lore heavy books.

The three new games that Steel Wool created are some of the more popular of the series with only the first FNAF being on top. The three games are all canon with the original and I find are sometimes more fun than the repetitive nature of the first 4 games. Along with all of these games we have a couple of other games that Scott Cawthon created in the canon FNAF universe. We have FNAF SISTER LOCATION (An interesting horror game that is nothing like any of the other games), FNAF ULTIMATE CUSTOM NIGHT (Considered part of the universe as it lets you create any FNAF night with any animatronic), FNAF PIZZERIA SIMULATOR (A lore heavy game where you run your own pizzeria with animatronics attacking you every night) and FNAF JOY OF CREATION (Not an officially canon game but was funded and worked on by Scott Cawthon).

In conclusion, FNAF is a revolutionary video game that changed the indie horror video game category heavily. Ever since then millions of people have been playing this simple yet classic game and still is able to keep up with the modern humans enjoyment.