Super Mario Boards

Spooky season is here

what’d I miss

Thinking about the history of "Mascot horror" as the people are calling it nowadays.

Like it started with some random guy in Texas in 2014, worked at a dollar store, his last game got obliterated by critics. People said the characters in his game looked like "animantronics" and thought they were horrifying. This inspired him and he soon came up with an idea for a new game. He started a Kickstarter that got zero dollars and he took it down. He began work on the game anyway, if it flopped, he would quit game development. He developed the game "Five Nights at Freddy's" in six months with the help of some close family. It was released on August 8 2014 for Windows. The effort that was put in the whole thing still shows today. A video by a popular youtuber called Markiplier would be released four days later.
It was titled: "WARNING: SCARIEST GAME IN YEARS | Five Nights at Freddy's - Part 1"
It would garner millions of views.
It has been nine years since FNAF 1 and I'm writing this one day before the Blumhouse movie drops.
The game was a success, he would soon make successful sequels. People have made fanart, fanfics, and entire fangames. The franchise is still a topic all those clickbaity content farms make stuff about, it's still finding success to this day! Though many aren't fond of the most recent title, people do like its DLC at least.

Now, earlier this year a little crappy game called Garten of Banban by two brothers was released. Youtubers who talk about "mascot horror" games made videos on this one a little bit after its release. It was a cashgrab, people called it such. People point to it and another game series called "Poppy's Playtime" as the downfall of the genre. This game, short, lacking substance in every area, that only got attention because of its poor quality, got a sequel. It was the same quality as the original and it got MORE attention. The same things were said, this time its small ironic fanbase GREW. It quickly became more POPULAR, content farm channels on Youtube Kids would soon take notice. The series' fanbase would grow less ironic and younger. A third game came out and the series became TRENDY. More and more odd clickbait vids would drop, ones on YT and ones on TIKTOK. Soon a 4th, and 5th were made and just recently the 6th title has come out. A 7th and 8th are on the way. This series that shouldn't have become a series, one that started with a game that people thought was SATIRE, has found a massive audience. We surely live in a timeline.

I dunno, FNAF is just a thing that's been with me for so long. It means a ton to me, even if its messy and not the scariest horror series out there. Its influence is huge, and I'm interested in checking it out and keeping track of it y'know? I love it. I love looking at FNAF from a meta perspective, it's fascinating to me. The birth and growth of this "mascot horror" genre is very interesting. I know most of the users here are like millennials who aren't really into horror and don't know what a Springtrap is. Who probably just shrug this stuff off as dumb substanceless fads that aren't worth looking at. Which like yeah you might actually be right in some ways LOL. But I think there is value in examining these "Three Nights with Scrunkly Sloppy Umpkins" games! If not them at least the reason they exist at all, FNAF!

Thank you if you read all my many many words, about the dum spoopy games that are dum and not spoopy. I am a teenager, freddy fazbear har har har har har five night freddy.

I feel like writing a review so here I go I just tried F-Zero 99. I was super excited for it and the 25 and 50-player tutorials worked great, but upon playing the actual 99-player game I wasn't impressed. It didn't function too much like an actual race and instead was kinda like a pushing battle between 98 other angry players, there was no real way to win except being pushed just the right way, and with perfect driving I consistently ranked below 60. Nintendo, carrying over the 99 concept into other games isn't always a guaranteed hit, I lost interest after like an hour. To me it just seemed like there was little thought put into it gameplay-wise and it was put together in the short time between the Direct and its release but oh well