Five Nights at Freddy's is an indie horror game, created by one man, Scott Cawthon. Before Five Nights, Scott had made mostly Christian or Family Friendly games, mostly sidescrollers with pre-rendered 3D models. His last game before Five Nights was criticized for having characters that look like creepy animatronics, and Scott had a small epiphany: he thought he could make something a lot scarier.
Thus he created Five Nights at Freddy's, a horror game where you play a night guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, trapped in the building with 4 deadly animatronics (5 if you count a kind of unexplained mystical one). You play through 5 nights at Freddy's like the title suggests, each one getting harder than the last.
Your entire goal is keeping the animatronics out of your security room. To do this, you have cameras to check on where the animatronics are, and buttons to close two blast doors. But, using the cameras or closing the doors costs power, which you have a limited supply of. If you run out of power, you can no longer close the doors, and it is game over. If one of the animatronics manages to get in, it is game over. Each game over is accompanied with a jump scare of the animatronic in question getting right in your face and screaming.
It doesn't sound like much, and it really isn't. It is an incredibly low budget indie game. Yet, the game was successful enough to warrant two sequels: Five Nights at Freddy's 2, which is technically a prequel, and Five Nights at Freddy's 3, set thirty years after the first game. Five Nights has had an entire trilogy, in the span of a year and a half, and the creator has raked in a TON of money for it.
You might wonder why this game became so popular as to warrant two sequels within months of each other. The answer is simple: people on youtube playing the game. There wasn't much marketing for Freddy's beyond putting the game up on Steam (think of it as a version of amazon focused on delivering games digitally), but some Lets Players (people who, as the name suggests, play games for an audience) played the game enough for it to reach memetic status, and it spiraled into a devoted fandom.
That's pretty much the brief history of Freddy's, minus the backstory about a serial child murderer who keeps returning to Freddy's, and the stuffing of the children into the animatronics, and someone's frontal lobe being bitten off by one of the animatronics (surprisingly that guy is still alive). Yeah the series is pretty messed up, but pretty tame compared to some of the other horror films and TV shows out there (Criminal Minds comes to mind for people worse than the Purple Man, the serial murderer so named because he appears in game as a pixelated purple man). It sounds like something bog standard for a horror film right?
That is exactly why this is so interesting and important. Five Nights at Freddy's was created by one man for very little, and now it is a franchise. Even if they also make the movie for very little money, it is a guaranteed success for two reasons:
1. Horror films always make money. Ouija some how made several times its budget.
2. There is a large, devoted fanbase for the series, that will almost certainly go see the film, regardless of its actual quality.
Five Nights is what is known as a "presold idea," a film property already in the public's consciousness that does marketing by generating hype rather than selling the idea to the audience.
As for the budget of the film... The budget would be quite minimal from my (fairly knowledgeable) calculations. There is one primary set, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. There are only 3-4 necessary characters (the security guard, the purple man, and both phone guys (they give the game's tutorial and some backstory)). The animatronics could be done with costumes and not CGI. Altogether, if they were aiming to spend as little as possible, the film could be done with less than a million dollars.
And of course because the film is quite likely to be successful for so little, there is bound to be a sequel the year after. They very well could make the game franchise into a film franchise.
To recap: Five Nights at Freddy's is guaranteed to make money, they don't need to spend a lot to make it, AND it is a franchise. All this was made possible by one guy making extremely simple PC games. This is what is interesting: this is the power of the internet, horror, and presold ideas.
The funny thing is, I predicted this like a month ago, right down to saying Warner Brothers would do it. It's not future sight, it is just knowing the market. It wasn't a question of if, but when.
And that's the story all about how an indie game maker earned a metric ton of money. It simultaneously gives one hope that they too could one day do that as well, and saddens that it takes horror to do it that easily.
(Note, I'm not discounting Scott Cawthon's difficulties in making the game, I'm sure the programming and animation were difficult in some fashion. But it really doesn't seem that hard when his release schedule was August 2014, November 2014, and March 2015. Film makers would squeal for that kind of release schedule)
To sign off, I'll say this: Five Nights may be the only horror film I'm actually interested in seeing. and I have not played the games, nor do I like horror films. At all. Let that speak for how powerful a marketing force this indie game has become.
No comments:
Post a Comment