But in all honesty, my introduction to this franchise came when a...uh...acquaintence of my wife's had her kid babysat, and the kid spent the whole time while I was not home showing my wife YouTubes of Markiplier playing this game.

My wife, freshly perterbed off me going on a months long Dragon Warrior IV campaign on the Wii, was interested in me getting into something, anything, made in the last decade, or at least this century. See, I live and thrive on 8-bit video games. And just before I left to show the...uh...acquaintence around town, I was playing Adventure for the atari 2600 in my "Man Cave" and the kid came by to tell me it "looks just like the Five Nights at Freddy's 2 "death minigames"".

Now, what the kid did not know was I was already rolling over in my mind what exactly this Five Nights at Freddy's thing is, since it sounded famliar, and I think it took a few weeks before I realized when I was looking up a pal's horror rock band - who also just so happened to be named "Freddie" - I ran across this and thought it was a child's slumber party game or something, something that made me instantly uncomfortable and therefore I closed the browser, and tried to use every trick in the book to find the actual band I was looking for in lieu of this game.

So I get back home and the wife, now highly excited that she had something "up my alley" - or more accuratley, HE has something up my alley to check out. So he loads up a "Scratch" copy of the game on his Chromebook and I proceed to play it. And needless to say, I was hooked, here was a modern video game, with an ATARI style gaming philosophy - simple, just six-in-game-hours for a night, and close doors, watch cameras, and listen for noises. But harder to master than it sounds on paper, just like Super Breakout.

And the thing is, this game was made by ONE MAN - Scott Cawthon. Not by a big megacorporation with a $1.5 million dollar budget, and a team of 180 to do all the graphics, sounds, and programming. This was all done by a man who at the time was a mere Dollar General Employee, a wage slave, like myself, and he created a game that's literally - in the span of just it's first 5 or so months, become a internet sensation to the likes of Mario and Pac-Man.

But I'm going to take a moment to explain why I went off the deep end for this one. Why I got so heavily into FNaF, because it's not as simple as people thought. Oh sure, it's a "video game", but I got into it because I kind of wished it were real at the time. If there had been a job with a risk of loss of life like this, and I could have taken it at the time, I would have. I was in a marriage on the rocks due to the opinions of other people outside of it, I was in a dead-end job at one of the "best" companies in the USA with no hopes of becoming an FTE despite gleaming reviews every year and going above and beyond daily, I was driving a shitty old truck (which I still drive) that everyone was on my ass about, I was financially struggling, and everyone, despite their awful opinions, were asking us when we were going to have kids - and the answer being not at all. I seriously was thinking "If I could just go to work, and not come back, it'd be better for everyone else. Plus the suffering would be over.". Plus it's kind of hard to fire a guy taking out his anger and rage on a bunch of haunted animatronics when he's already dead and stuffed in a suit. It's called depression, and I suffer from it, a lot.

So this was my catharsis of sorts, come home, play Freddy's, make a YouTube of it for the hell of it, and provide my unique adult perspective in the rare occasion I'm feeling social, that's it. No lore, no goofiness. Put on SAGA and let Foxy freight train me, and laugh after I pick myself off the floor. That's it.

After a brief kickstarter, the game came out sometime in mid-late 2014, and some of the Let's Players of the time, including one of the most popular, played it. I think his name was Yammimash or some such business. Anyway, this guy was friends with a guy named Markiplier. Markiplier, a dude about my age with a radio friendly voice, not to mention a fear of animatronics already, made for good entertainment as he yelled, screamed, made "funny" facial expressions at the camera, and generally, was/is an extremely entertaining host as a let's player. And as others joined in: BlasphemousHD, Dawko, Razzbowski, JackSepticEye, and so on - this kind of became a new trend. See, for a time, FNaF - as it's called - was known as "The best game everybody watches and nobody plays". It seems the vast majority of the audience were people watching the game.

From the success, Scott's fortunes changed over night, and of course, not even six months after, he had a sequel ready, and the whole thing snowballed from there. I have a small feeling, over time, Cawthon WANTED the series to come to an end, but it never actually managed to, it just kept getting bigger, and bigger, and snowballing. At this early phase myself, I was absent from the whole thing - I did not get into it until a year later when the 4th game game out.

Basically, you, Mike Schmidt, are a minimum wage Paul Blart Mall Cop type working in a CEC/Showbiz ripoff resturant with a tumultuous history, and likely on it's very last legs. Seems easy huh, six hours a night, just sitting in an office, could probably sleep through those shifts huh? But nope, there's a catch....a huge one...given right in the game's introductory speech over the phone (if you chose not to mute it)...

Hello...uh....hello. I've got a message for you, to help you get through your first night.....

Basically, the plot is, while you indeed seem to have the easiest job in the world at first glance, it instantly becomes the hardest as soon as you're informed by the "Phone Guy" that your're not really protecting the establishment, you're protecting yourself......from a handful of murderous Animatronic Mascots. And it's your job, from midnight till six, to keep these electronic monstrosities out of your office, for roughly, oh say, six hours, at minimum wage.

But a key element is atmosphere. And this place captures that atmosphere of a pizza entertainment family place resturant after hours that's on it's last legs of business. You have animatronics that look somewhat aged, but they don't look like a over-done attempt at aging, nor do they look like something brand new. They sort of have that interesting, spacey, late-seventies/early eighties quality to them that makes it believable. But the most important part is the limited vision aspect. The looking at creepy old security cameras with RF interference, strange raster flips, and snow, even with one being permanantly out the whole game, paired with the animatronics lurking within arms reach of the shadows, staring into the cameras with intensity that only increases the uncanney valley effect of the design - works well to turn what normally would be seen as a childish and somewhat innocuous environment, into a frightful envrionment.