In Five Nights at Freddy's, you (initially) played a protagonist going by the name of "Mike Schmidt" who took on this self-destructive job of working at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza during the night shift as a "night guard". Your job? Stay awake from midnight till six a.m. and watch over the resturant. But is it really THAT easy - oh heck no. You see, Fazbear Entertainment, a nefarious parody of Corporate blase-ness towards serious issues and it's employees, does not tell you until you are getting a phone call orientation on your first night from the epynymous "Phone Guy" (played by Scott himself) that the Animatronics roam the resturant at night and if they see you, they will try to forcibly stuff you into a Freddy Fazbear animatronic suit. So you now spend your time in the tiny office in the back watching cameras, closing doors, flashing lights, and doing what you can while attempting to conserve power for your 9 minute, six-hour-in-game shift at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. It had a nice, short, concise, open-ended story with a lot of room for speculation, just enough to set the atmosphere, and then you are in for a quite immersive experience.

What happened though was twofold. First off, it started making the rounds in the YouTube "Let's Player" community, raising awareness and popularity of channels such as those of Jacksepticeye, Razzbowski, and most especially Markiplier who is the self-proclaimed "King" of the series. Markiplier in particular, is where most people can trace the start of the phenomenon that built up around this rather simple yet fun game. Then these particularly expresisve YouTubers got scads of new fans due to their freakouts on camera any time they witnessed something either scary or unexpected. This generated sort of a "feedback loop" if you will that lead to the success of these and many other channels on YouTube - new FNaF game comes out, Markiplier plays it for example, then tons of kids start watching.

So this is where the "FNaF YouTuber" thing got started. Some moved on (Markipliar kinda has), some left, quit, or dissappeared, and some are still going to this day (Dawko). It also earned the FNaF Games a reputation of being "the greatest game nobody played" because so many just watched other people play the game, rather than getting it themselves and playing it, at least, not without some kind of popularity/financial motivation behind it.

Seeing the success of his creation, Scott quickly started putting together a Sequel, which we will talk about on that page. That said, Five Nights at Freddy's became one of the most, if not the most, successful game franchises of the 2010's - putting the homocidal animatronic bear and his mechanical colleagues right up there with such recognozable names as Pac-Man, Mario, Link, and Sonic the Hedgehog - an amazing feat for a one-man development team working between shifts at Dollar General.

That said, the lowest hardware I have run this on is a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 Dell with 3GB of RAM and XP. However, I had a bit of a hilarious experience when I decided to run this on Windows 95 on a 486 DX4-100 with 64MB of RAM and a 2MB VESA Video Card, and actually managed to get the bloody TITLE to show up on screen for a brief millisecond....so maybe the requirements are lower than either I or Scott (or for that matter Clickteam) thought.

The "be careful what you wish for" comes in here, basically, I'm an avid RETRO-gamer, I like OLD Games. Honestly, I'm a curmudgeon who sticks to Atari and NES stuff mostly, only delving into SNES or newer when I feel the rare nostalgia for the 3-4 titles I liked from those newer platforms post-guitar for me. At the time, she was wondering if I could get into a *new* game, and well, her friend's kid - boy did he find that game. I was tasked with showing her friend around town, while she babysat the kid. And when we got back, well, our conversation went like this....

HER: Hey, creepingnet, have Doom show you the new game he just found, it's really cool!
ME: Okay, what is it.
HER: Have him show you.
KID: Hey, this is called Five Nights at Freddys. Basically, it's this game about a purple guy who murders five children and stuffs them into animatronics, who become possesed, and you have to survive the night by keeping them out of your office at this pizzaria.
ME: (stunned)...whoah....the title's familiar (thinks back to six months before looking up his future horror rock band in Reno and finding a game with a description sounding like it was about a bunch of anthrophomorphized animals holding some kind of slumber party turned up in the search results......was this THAT game?)
KID: (fires up FNaF)Check this out!

Well, I played it, and honestly, it gave me some SERIOUS ATARI Vibes. I mean it was a simple game, you just sit in an office, flashing lights, looking at cameras, and shutting doors. The concept is so absurd and laughable it almost seems like the game was a joke straight out of MAD Magazine. But the vibes are not just "Playing Adventure for the first time without an instruction manual", but from the vibe of the place - Freddy Fazbear's Pizza - itself. It looked like how I remembered Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza being, not now, with their stylized ticket-smasher games and TV augmented side shows, but when I was growing up....

...the "good ole days" when you had uncanny valley Animatronics with jaws that moved the speed of an oscillating fan, while they herkly jerky their way around the stage, while parent's babies shreiked in terror, the second youngest people would cover their ears and duck under the table, and us, we would raise a slice of pizza looking at each other like "should we be enteratined due to humor or the cheesy cornieness of this? Or should we be terrified one of us is going to get boomeranged by a flying metal jaw structure?". Where we'd ride the bus home from Spring Villa Day Camp or our friend's pareant's cars home while making up awful stories about possessed animatronics - it dawned on me, this Scott Cawthon guy, he WAS one of MY generation, or Gen X - he KNEW what this was about, and he did a great job on the atmosphere.