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Novels: Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The cut-off sentence in the Night 5 phone call is misinterpreted as "The Joy of Creation," even though the correct line is "The Joy of Creative Service."
- Breakthrough Hit: While Scott Cawthon had made several games prior to this, most of them didn't do too well; in particular, some of the character designs were criticized as unintentionally creepy. Cawthon decided to run with this critique and make a horror game; the massive success of Five Nights at Freddy's resulted in several sequels/spin-offs and the franchise becoming an international hit.
- Creator's Oddball: Believe it or not, this is Scott Cawthon's first horror game; all his previous games were family-friendly. This would have especially been the case had Five Nights at Freddy's been his last game like he planned.
- Dummied Out:
- According to this analysis
of the source code, Scott had originally planned a system of lives, where the player would be brought back to Night 1 after five deaths. This was dropped for pretty obvious reasons. - Golden Freddy was this in the android port before the whole thing was overhauled in 2019; the random number generator responsible for spawning him would only generate negative values due to a bug, while the game expected positive values. Explained in more detail in this video.
- According to this analysis
- Missing Trailer Scene: In the original trailer, Bonnie is shown running down a hallway, a moment given to Foxy in the final game. He's also shown removing the costume head, revealing the endoskeleton inside, which is nowhere to be seen in the actual game.
- No Budget: Since Scott Cawthon made this game while he was an unknown indie developer who made games solely as a hobby, this game was made on little to no budget. All the audio (save for most of the phone calls) consists of free stock sound effects.
- Urban Legend of Zelda: One of the most widespread rumors about the game is that holding still during a power outage delays Freddy's attack. The origin of this rumor is a line from Phone Guy on Night 3 where he suggests doing just that before brushing it off as a bad idea, but many players took it as a legitimate hint and it became an accepted strategy, with confirmation bias and the random length of time it takes for Freddy to attack resulting in nobody really questioning it. Eventually, datamining confirmed the game doesn't check whether the player is looking around during a blackout and that the variable length of time it takes for Freddy to kill you is based on three RNG checks; it takes between 5 and 20 seconds for Freddy to show up after the blackout starts, Freddy plays his song for another 5 to 20 seconds, and Freddy has a 20% chance to jumpscare the player every two seconds after the song ends.
- Really, there were a lot of rumors and nuggets of speculation around the behavior of the animatronics in general, such as:
- Freddy being able to go through a hole in the wall behind the office poster if you close both doors on him. This is likely a misconception based on the fact that Freddy can silently enter your office but not be able to attack until he succeeds his attack roll, which is entirely random, meaning he can be in your office a surprising amount of time but doesn't attack because he's having some really bad RNG.
- That you have to look at Foxy specifically to keep him in check, but he'll also get more upset the more you look at him - this one isn't even difficult to test, either, but somehow it got a lot of traction. Basically any camera usage freezes Foxy without agitating him at all, and his entire role is to ensure that the player regularly uses their camera rather than just use the lights and the doors to keep Bonnie, Chica and Freddy at bay and limit their power usage. The fact that only camera usage is the key for Foxy is actively hinted at by Phone Guy, who doesn't actually specify that keeping the camera on Foxy does the trick, but rather that he only gets more active if the cameras are inactive at all.
- Really, there were a lot of rumors and nuggets of speculation around the behavior of the animatronics in general, such as:
