Top Ten Reasons Five Nights at Freddy's is a Great Franchise

Now, I'm not saying jump scares are scary. They aren't. It is a well-known fact. The reason these games are scary is they do something new. Most horror games give you three options: You can fight, hide, or run from the enemy. Five Nights, however, gives you none of these options. It only allows you to delay the inevitable through cameras, doors, and lights, which it also takes away with the power system.

There is a reason that Mark was scared the first time he played the game: it did something he wasn't expecting. You can see it in the first few seconds of his playthrough, where he used the keyboard, realized nothing happened, checked to make sure he was using the right buttons, and then was wide-eyed at the fact it did something new.

Another thing to note is that all horror games hit a point where they aren't scary anymore. The greatest horror games out there aren't scary after being watched and played multiple times. After one or two videos, you're no longer afraid. We see that with UCN especially, where Scott just has the model shake in front of you. It is a game over screen.

Finally, we are terrified of what happens when we eventually lose. Most let's players tense up on harder difficulties because they're scared of getting killed and losing all their progress. Maybe I should rename this the games are incredibly tense, but this one grabs the attention better.

Before Five Nights at Freddy's, there was one massively successful indie game: Minecraft. However, around the time game designing was becoming more accessible, Minecraft had been massively popular. Plus, a month after Five Nights was released, Mojang was sold to Microsoft, thereby making it a triple-A game.

After Five Nights blew up, more and more followed suit. Undertale, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Doki Doki Literature Club, Hello Neighbor, Yandere Simulator, Cuphead, and so many more became a reality because of Five Nights. Indie games were given a better light thanks to Five Nights. It helped these games get ported to mainstream consoles, and console stores were flooded with indie games. All of this would have taken much longer without Five Nights at Freddy's.

Nowadays, there are thousands of copycats running around doing the same thing the same way that Five Nights did, but when it first launched it was one hundred percent different. This also helped to make the game scarier as mentioned in point one.

Anyone can hop into the game and do well. The game does something most games don't do, which is ease you into the gameplay. It starts off easy, but then quickly annihilates with AI that literally learns your playstyle and combats that. Even now, most people still don't have a perfect, one-hundred percent successful attempt rate.

Five Nights books aren't the best of the best. They don't compare to Zelda, Halo, or Doom when it comes to the quantity and quality of books. However, its books are decent with a very interesting series about a girl named Charlie, two fun little activity books to get for your kids, and a brand new series in the vein of the Goosebumps books of old.

Also, it has the potential to be a great video game movie with real-life animations, Blumhouse Productions being the producer/staff, and finally, multiple scripts being written specifically tailored to please new and old fans.

With the recent Five Nights ports to consoles, the door has been opened wider for even more people to experience these games. Before, you needed a computer to play the games. Then, they were given mobile releases, which opened the door further. The real kicker was the console ports because a lot of gamers have consoles, which really allows more people to experience the game.

As of 2020, PC games produce about 21 percent of game revenue, with consoles being the same. Mobile games contribute a lot to game revenue, but that's due to gacha games dominating that market. So (excluding mobile), if fifty percent of gamers use consoles and Five Nights was only on PC, around 500 million people wouldn't have the chance to experience the game.

The first game plays more into your childhood fears when you arrived at Chuck E. Cheese's. These big, terrifying robots with eyes that seem to stare deep into your soul. The sequels brought more and more destroyed robots with human-like animatronics (the scarier ones in my opinion) sprinkled in for flavor.

The Nightmare animatronics are the definition of Eldritch Abominations. With more teeth than the Olsen twins, these behemoths are also massive in the game due to us being in the mind of a child, making them that much more imposing. No matter how stale the games become, the designs will always be the most pants-wetting part about these monstrosities.

This definitely could be considered a negative. However, I believe there is a much worse game series at producing too many games. They call him Mario. With over two hundred games and thirty-five years in the business, that equates to about five to six games per year. Scott Cawthon, at his max, got three in one year.

Not to mention that, unlike Mario, each game adds new characters and new mechanics. Not to say Mario doesn't do that too - far from it. Most Mario sequels add one or two characters and one or two power-ups. However, there are usually quite a few games where they just keep some or all of Mario's characteristics and continue on with his adventures.

In Five Nights, every character changes from game to game. Even Foxy, who has a consistent look but not often a consistent mechanic, varies slightly from game to game. For example, sometimes you flash him with the light, or you turn on the Pirate Cove camera.

To summarize the lore into one sentence: it boils down to man kills child, child possesses robot, robot kills man, man becomes part of robot, robot kills more men, man and child burn together, all of it might be fake, man comes back from hell thanks to vicious malware, starts a cult, and more robots in the world. That is about as simple as I can make it. If you don't want to play the game to get the lore, read about it or watch it online. Mostly because I don't know the lore myself.