Hi I’m Grant and I’m a FNAF YouTuber.
Audience: “Hi Grant”
Five nights at Freddy's no doubt changed the landscape of YouTube.
It brought with it a colossal impact on gaming and mental health so much so that the world
will never be the same.
Where video game analysis channels once hopped from new release to new release, Five Nights
at Freddy brought with it an audience so gargantuan and so hungry that entire channels rose to
stardom simply by riding the wave.
Drawn like a moth to a flame, YouTube creators threw their hat into the ring of the FNAF
mystery.
Who is the Purple Man?
What’s the deal with Golden Freddy?
Why can’t I stop crying?
Who is the Orange Man?
Did I refill my xanax prescription?
Where’d this noose come from?
Why can’t I remember last night?
Wheres my dog?
Indeed we here at Treesicle rode the FNAF wave hard.
So much so I began to believe that free will is an illusion.
Not because of some deep philosophical justification, but because for the last three years...I served
Scott.
And Freddy.
And the millions of children and real life grown ups who had the audacity to click yet
another FNAF thumbnail.
Ours are pretty dope if I’m being honest.
BUT!
Amongst all these FNAF questions that have bubbled up from the mystery there is a far
more personal question I’d like to ask you.
Are you ready?
I’m just gonna assume you are because I can’t hear anything you say.
Do you know the toll Five Nights at Freddy’s has taken on the YouTube community?
And that’s not to take away from the brilliance of Mr. Cawthon and the phenomenon he expelled
from his mind and into cyberspace.
Nay!
It’s a genuine inquiry as to what you really know about the other side of YouTube.
The side which cobbles together ideas, video clips and creativity to bring you the entertainment
you expect.
The side which had the bizarre and oddly pressure inducing responsibility of looking at the
loose collection of factoids, story elements, parallel universes, and more to bring you
FNAF theories that were passable for release.
Our side of the story.
We’ve dawdled long enough.
LET’S JUMP INTO IT.
COME ON FOXY YOU FOXY MOFO WE’RE ABOUT TO GO DEEP.
And not in the way I saw you on deviantart.
HNNNNNG GIVE ME YOUR ENERGY FNAF HEADS.
RAISE YOUR HANDS TO THE SKY, PRAISE THE GOD OF YOUR 3AM NIGHTMARES AND PREPARE YOURSELF
FOR THE STORY OF A FRANCHISE THAT CHALLENGED THE STABILITY OF HEALTH AND PSYCHE and my
own self-image.
Of purposeful randomness and insidious vagueness literally pulling at our heart strings.
This is the story behind the story of Five Nights at Freddy’s, the story...you never
knew.
First things first, let’s talk about some YouTubers who were never quite the same since
Freddy Fazbear dared to stare into our soul with his vacant, dead eyes.
While some rocketed to success in no small part on the back of Scotts brainchild, others
were lured into a false sense of security.
One such guy who always comes to mind for me is Smike.
Remember Smike?
He seemed like a solid dude and his channel has almost 300 million total views and his
backlog is still getting about 700k views a month.
Yet he doesn’t release anymore.
Not for a long time.
Why would a channel like that just give it all up?
I BLAME FNAF.
And the questionable decisions the franchise nudged him (and many others) towards.
And before I get into this I want to make it clear I’m not blaming Mr. Fazbear himself
for how certain channels lived and died with the hype, I’m just pointing out that when
a gold rush is happening it prompts certain people to lose track of the bigger picture
soas to collect more of that shiny, glittery gold for those sweet grills I look so sick
in.
When a certain topic promises a minimum of 100k views and a maximum of several million,
the desire to cover that topic over and over and over and over and over and over becomes...all
too alluring.
Smike, at his peak, was pulling in at least 7 million views a month (probably a whole
lot more) and he was just one dude.
That’s some solid ad dollars, people.
However, he made the choice of not diversifying while so many eyeballs were pointing at him.
You see, riding trends is a lot like surfing.
The bigger the wave, the harder it is to not wipe out.
I don’t actually know anything about surfing but the analogy is convincing so just roll
with it.
Anyway, Smike is the perfect example of what happens when you serve a trend versus a trend
serving you.
It ultimately manifested in an unfortunate deviantart controversy where he had to take
down many of his videos because he filled them with FNAF deviantart and didn’t properly
ask for permission from the artists.
He got plenty of hate for this and rightfully so but I truly believe Smike had no bad intentions
and rather was just caught up in the gold rush.
There was no curly queue mustache being twirled as deviantartists squirmed helplessly on the
railroad tracks.
Just a normal guy coming into more views, subscribers, and money than he’s ever had
and being so blinded by it he didn’t hesitate to right click and “save image as”.
When the criticism boiled over, a massive chunk of his FNAF Top 10 videos wiped out
(and rightfully so) and when looking at the list of artists he apologized to in his apology
video, you can guess just how many videos the dude lost.
Point is, he seemed sorry, lost lots of views (but was still getting plenty) and was unable
to smoothly branch out to new horizons.
When you’re used to getting hundreds of thousands of views every video it can be a
difficult thing to struggle to get even 80k per video.
Especially when trying to pay the bills.
Had FNAF not tainted the vision of this channel, who knows where it would have gone.
RIP Smike.
May your post-YouTube days be filled with merriment and devoid of fazbears.
Then we’ve got Jirard Khalil from The Completionist!
Oh boy did he have some things to say.
In case you didn’t know (or couldn’t tell from the name) it’s this dude’s job to
100% every single game he commits himself to playing.
He had this to say about FNAF:
You heard it here (and there) folks!
A grown man went and is still going to therapy because of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
And don’t get me wrong, if you’ve seen Jirad’s content you know he puts massive
amounts of effort into his content.
The guy COMPLETES games.
He just recently completely finished Pokemon Let’s Go, completing all the Master trainers.
The guy doesn’t shy away from difficulty, he thrives on it.
So his story speaks volumes about FNAF’s gameplay.
Jirard goes on to clarify that it wasn’t really the jumpscares and spoopyness of FNAF
that gave him PTSD it was the random chance associated with FNAF.
Fact is, when you’re playing these games at the highest skill level possible you can’t
win unless you get lucky.
If certain combinations of animatronics come at you throughout the night...you’re done.
Even if you’ve got all the best strategies down and are executing them perfectly...this
game will kick you in the nuts and make you play it over and over and over and over again
until you finally get lucky enough for your perfect playing to pay off.
Remember, this dude has to 100% games.
He doesn’t have the luxury of dabbling and speculating on the lore like I do.
Not to mention these games are basically ADD simulators interspersed with heart-attack
inducing jumpscares.
Combine that with a person who can’t just quit and has a tight deadline and you get
a guy who now questions if maybe the 9-5 lifestyle would have been better.
He went on further to say FNAF challenged his abilities as a completionist and tainted
every other game he played for months upon months upon months.
Poor Jirard was so discomboobulated by FNAF that he had to stop after Sister Location.
In spite of the views and in spite of the YouTube algorithm whatchamahoosit the man
didn’t come back to the franchise until a couple years after this podcast and even
then he didn’t tackle the new games, he only re-played the ones he’d already beaten.
Which was a great video by the way.
Even Scott Cawthon agrees!
Alright so we’ve got one guy who rode the hype so hard it ruined his channel and another
who needed therapy and it sucked a noticeable portion of the fun out of other non-FNAF games
for him.
Phew this is heavy stuff people!
But let’s not forget about Dawko!
The loveable Cockney.
Perhaps you had the pleasure of watching his Ultimate Custom Night streams where a couple
times in a row he was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Where he had a mental breakdown.
Dude was trying to beat 50/20 and like the milkman...he delivered.
But he didn’t strike up a conversation with your mom and somehow get to talking about
her high thread count sheets and then conveniently go upstairs to see what they’re all about.
A class act.
His reaction was beautiful and priceless.
So pure and so triumphant.
Like a man who’d been locked in a dark room against his will finally being let outside
and feeling the sunlight and hearing the birds chip.
Then in a recent video he went full stockholm syndrome and couldn’t contain his excitement
for the upcoming FNAF releases as laid out in Scotts announcement.
I’m happy for ya buddy.
Clearly it’s been an emotional roller coaster.
Not just him but even for MatPat.
Heck, just scroll down on Dawkos update video and you’ll see tons “Matpat is now crying
himself to sleep” comments.
We got them on our update video regarding Scotts announcement too.
From game players to lore channels, FNAF takes no prisoners.
IT ONLY DESTROYS YOUR SOUL.
It’s at this point you may be wondering…”this is all very interesting Grant I didn’t know
the full extent to which Five Nights at Freddys was destroying lives and toying with emotions
but what’s your experience been?”
Well.
That is an interesting question.
I have a complicated relationship with this franchise.
If Freddy Fazbear was my boyfriend I’d have a restraining order against him but would
also still call him every night and ask how his day went.
THAT’S HOW ABUSE WORKS PEOPLE.
Sometimes.
The story was purposely and frustratingly cryptic, we got yelled at for covering it
too much or not enough.
We forewent covering characters and games I find fascinating in favor of the phenomenon
that would get more views.
Anyway the Treesicle team and I owe a lot to this disharmonious symphony of animatronics.
Our first video on the relevant subject came out it march of 2015.
It had a running olive garden joke and got lots of views.
However.
Slowly but surely FNAF crept deeper and deeper into our channel.
One video, then another, then another, then another.
Where we once worked part time, covering mostly Nintendo games, a sprinkling of trending whatever
games, and various characters we just found interesting...FNAF changed that.
Indie horror was the place to be and the short term maximization of growth and profit was
the mantra of the hour.
That’s an exaggeration because we still did and still do cover a variety of non-indie
horror topics but as more and more FNAF heads subscribed, our fanbase became split between
the more adult, dirty, filthy humor kinds of people (like us) and the much younger,
much more “family friendly” demographic who really just wants indie horror.
The views were nice, the money was nice.
The subscribers were flowing.
It made leaving our full time jobs that much easier but with it came the impossible task
of cobbling together scripts on a franchise purposefully designed to be mysterious.
It felt like every time we wrote a new FNAF script we had to re-learn half of everything
because the story wasn’t coherent...it was a loose collection of facts and speculations
that the human mind has trouble latching onto compared to a story that unfolds organically.
As our humour remained edgy, our audience grew younger, and the adpocalypse spanked
us bad good, things got strange around here.
If you look at our backlog you’ll notice we cover much more indie horror now than we
did two or three years ago.
Hello Neighbor, Bendy and the Ink Machine, (sort of) Doki Doki, and Granny even.
All of these appeal to a rather specific demographic within the larger genre of gaming content
and I’m certainly accepting of the change but I can’t deny this strong nudge towards
this genre had everything to do with Scott Cawthon’s brain child.
Of course the decisions we here at Treesicle made were our own but like many, the gold
rush was upon us and it was hard to ignore it.
We capitalized and so we had night upon night of mental torment, constant fact checking,
re-checking and even still (admittedly) not getting it all right.
Our humor was...less than accepted by parts of our newer, younger audience and with that
came deeper questions of what this team and I are here to do.
I get messages on discord and most of them are people telling me their FNAF theories.
That’s cool and I know how much notoriety FNAF got us, but with the types of messages
I get you’d think I worshipped Foxy at every full moon and played FNAF in every spare moment
of my free time.
I don’t.
It’s a fine game but there’s so much more we’ve covered on this channel that doesn’t
get the same attention.
That however is besides the point.
Busting my arse this past year and a half on one franchise and the games that piggybacked
off it has been monumental in building discipline but it’s also been extremely difficult creatively.
I used to spend hours upon hours doing deep research into everything from Metroid to Halo
to I am Bread and making dumb jokes while giggling the whole time but now if I put all
those hours into games like that it won’t pay off and it certainly won’t pay the bills.
Virtually everyone has to show up to a jobby job every day to keep the heater on so I’m
grateful I can make a living doing this at all.
But when I went full time YouTube I took a financial and emotional risk.
That’s why not having the freedom I once had hit me harder than another day in the
9-5 ever did.
To be completely honest I’ve been in a creative rut for over a year.
Not just because of FNAF but because of the opportunities it tempted us with and the insane
work schedules that followed.
I’ve only recently began climbing out this weird mental rut.
This whole crazy journey has made me think deeply about why I even make videos at all.
What was it I used to feel and how do I get it back?
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good Hello Neighbor mystery to solve but now I don’t
get to dive into why Samus is the bridge between all forms of consciousness in the universe
or why Ezio Auditore da Firenze is a renaissance-born Italian assassin living in the shadow of his
family’s unjust execution!
Safe to say my mental health and that of those on the team was challenged by this franchise
and the direction it led us towards.
There was always more to talk about, so why not release more often and work ‘till your
life sucks?
I even had to take a vacation a couple months ago.
Mental health and stuff.
It was cool.
I drove ten hours to a mountain in Utah with no cell service and finally got some peace
and quiet.
Some alone time.
I was the happiest I’d felt in a long time.
It was a sanity trip but it was also for a personal video that’ll be done eventually.
Then I cleaned the house, worked on that video, planned my brothers bachelor party and did
plenty of nothing.
I feel much better now.
But here we are, having to adjust our humour and style.
We now go for edgy jokes that go over kids heads but the adults still get.
Also less swearing.
Both for daddy YouTube and the childinz who now watch us.
Mostly for daddy tho.
Did I mention the younger audience we accidentally acquired exasperated our problems with the
adpocalypse?
Parents don’t like us.
And they don’t mind hitting that report button.
I ain’t complaining, they’re real YouTube Heroes.
Just saying it like it is.
All there is to do now is look to the future.
We’re in the limbo between Ultimate Custom Night and the releases yet to come.
We’re in an age where stories that are barely stories at all hit it big because the audience
can’t help but wonder what’s really going on.
Scott Cawthon innovated and with it came a flurry of copycats, spinoffs, parodies, and
“tastefully inspired bys” we often don’t hesitate to cover because mysteries are dope
and paying the bills is nice.
FNAF changed many lives.
Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, and sometimes in ways that have yet
to fully play out.
It’s a franchise that completely altered the course of gaming and YouTube as we know
it.
FNAF wasn’t just a game that became big online.
It was literally life changing, and many of those lives are left wondering, “was it
worth it?”
As for me, the jury is still out on that question.
But for now…
That’s the hidden truth of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Our story.
The story you never knew.
That’s my take on Five Nights at Freddy’s.
This was certainly a different and more personal video and I hope you liked it.
I’m curious to know what you thought so don’t hesitate to say down below.
If you liked it, great!
If you thought I was whiny...also great!
I’m Grant, that’s all I got for today and I’ll see you all later.
Bye!