Trivia / Friday Night Funkin'

• Acting for Two: Boyfriend rapping against Daddy Dearest during Week 1, Pico during Week 3, Girlfriend in the tutorial, and Senpai during Week 6, as all are voiced by Kawai Sprite.
• Approval of God:
  • The developers frequently retweet various fanart on their respective Twitter accounts.
  • Ninjamuffin has stated to be really impressed with the Friday Night Funkin': Neo Game Mod, and has also stated that he'd love to make the game's graphics look similar to the Friday Night Vibin'/RTX On mod.
  • Ninjamuffin's favorite mod is Friday night funkin' but bad, which replaces the graphics with simplistic drawings and the character noises with half-hearted singing attempts using a poor microphone.
  • Whitty is, by all accounts a fan character made for a mod, but his appearance is so akin to the actual game that some have confused him as an official character. This has not gone unnoticed by the devs, who retweeted copious amounts of fanart of Whitty, furthering his close resemblance to the actual game.
  • Phantom Arcade once drew fanart of the Friday Night Fankan mod.
  • While streaming work on the game, Phantom Arcade will occasionally put on mod OSTs as background music, such as Dave and Bambi: Golden Apple Edition or Hotline 024.
  • When asked about Vs Sonic.exe in a Reddit AMA, ninja_muffin99 replied with "pour one out," indicating that he liked the mod and was disappointed that it got canceled.
• Ascended Fanon: ninjamuffin99 jokingly claimed that Pico and the Boyfriend dated each other at one point in the past and were now exes in response to seeing ship art of the two. Despite it just being that, a joke, ninjamuffin99's own stance on headcanons plus the general embracing of the concept by the developers and even Tom Fulp himself, led many to run with the idea, so much so that ninjamuffin99 later confirmed in a live stream that them being exes is in fact canon, and not just a meme anymore.
• Colbert Bump: Due to Newgrounds being relatively dormant in the 2010s, the appearance of guest characters and cameos from the site's heyday usually reignites interest in the character's source work, such as Pico or the Tankmen series. Even Spooky Month, a newer Newgrounds series with a decently sized following, gained a boost of popularity from Skid and Pump's inclusion in Week 2. This also extends to mods, with The Tricky Mod reigniting interest in Madness Combat long before Hank was added officially.
• Content Leak: An early build of the Week 8 update was accidentally posted to the game's GitHub page by ninjamuffin99.
• Corpsing: Many of Johnny Utah's Game Over lines have the Captain barely holding it together after insulting the Boyfriend for losing. Similarly, after calling Boyfriend a cunt, he bursts out laughing only to call both him and Girlfriend cunts.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Infamous Mexican production company Badabun made a video about FNF warning parents that Friday Night Funkin is not for children, something that was very obvious to many people. They also compared Lemon Demon with Momo, even though both characters have nothing to do with each other. To add insult to injury, most of the footage was taken from mods of the game (such as bbpanzu's Pinkie Pie mod) rather than the game itself.
• Creator Backlash: PhantomArcade has stated on multiple occasions that he's grown to dislike how the sprites for the first few weeks look, and the only reason he hasn't redrawn them is because it'd make the game take even longer to come out.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Girlfriend, like most of the other characters, is voiced by Kawai Sprite himself.
• Demand Overload: Week 7, featuring Newgrounds' mascot, Tankman, was initially released exclusively to the site; the influx of people from this was so large it crashed the site. After the site went back up, Friday Night Funkin''s page was disabled for two days to make sure the servers would stay up as people kept flocking to the page.
• Descended Creator: The game's composer, Kawai Sprite, provides the voices (i.e. his voice is used to create the song notes) for most of the characters, the exceptions being Skid and Pump (voiced by Sr. Pelo), Mommy Mearest (voiced by Monica Franco), Monster (voiced by Bassetfilms) and Tankman (voiced by JohnnyUtah).
• Diagnosis of God: Boyfriend and Girlfriend are neurodivergent, as they both have ADHD and are on the autism spectrum.
• Doing It for the Art: In a tweet by Ninja Muffin, he says that even if everyone stopped playing Friday Night Funkin', the team would still continue making the game.
• Dummied Out: On Week 4, there was going to be a Funny Background Event in which the backup dancers get hit and decapitated by an occasional lamp post◊. This graphic feature was cut to save development time. Phantom Arcade has stated that this could be reimplemented in the future, only that all of the backup dancers would get hit at the same time instead of one by one as it was intended before.^note The animation is fully restored in ShadowMario's Psych Engine mod.
• Fan Community Nickname: The fandom is affectionately called the "Funkdom" by outsiders.
• Fandom Life Cycle: Stage 4. Most people who have never played a rhythm game before have been introduced to the genre thanks to this game.
• Lying Creator: Post week 6, a new Couch Gag was added noting "In Loving Memory of — HenryEYES" with the creator ninjamuffin99 and other people stating that he had passed away from COVID-19. In actuality, HenryEYES is very much alive; he had simply left the Internet due to online and offline issues, up to and including being bullied by ninjamuffin99 and his friends.
• Meme Acknowledgement:
  • Two of the Couch Gags give shoutouts to two common fan names for the Boyfriend, though both are disproved as official in the process:
    his name isn't keith — dumb eggy lol
    his name isn't evan — silly tiktok
  • Another Couch Gag references a piece of fanart involving Daddy Dearest directing a Freudian Threat towards The Boyfriend.
    goodbye — my penis
• Newbie Boom: The sheer popularity of the game has led to a massive surge of new visitors and users to Newgrounds, after the site had largely been dormant for most of the mid to late 2010s, to where the reveal of week 7 ended up causing the site to outright crash and get renovated to handle the massive influx of newcomers.
• Referenced by...: The game's layout and accuracy icons are referenced on Nickelodeon's official YouTube channel of all things; specifically, in a video featuring songs from various shows airing on the network and on Paramount+.
• Revival by Commercialization: Parry Gripp's song "I Got No iPhone", while not obscure, was primarily known to only three groups of people (largely Millenials and early Zoomers); people who were fans of Gripp in the late 2000s-early 2010s, people who used Flipnote Hatena around the same time (due to a famous animation featuring the same song) and a few portions of the Five Nights at Freddy's fandom (thanks to an infamous animation featuring Bonnie and the song). However, Bassetfilm's cover of the song in his Monster voice, prompting numerous fanworks, brought the song significantly more attention, including introducing a lot of younger people to the song for the first time.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: One of the very first Newgrounds characters planned for the game was SoftDon's mascot Cassette Girl, who was announced as both an opponent and playable character alongside Tankman, Pico, and Hank in the game's original trailer. During the development of the full version of Friday Night Funkin', an ex of Don's accused him of sexually assaulting her while they were together. The Funkin' Crew subsequently scrapped any and all plans they had for Cassette Girl.
• Role Reprise:
  • Skid and Pump's vocals are provided by Sr. Pelo, who voices the duo in their home series.
  • JohnnyUtah returns to provide the vocals for Tankman, who he voices in the Tankmen shorts, as well voicing him in the cutscenes for Week 7.
• Rule 34 – Creator Reactions: Upon releasing "Satin Panties" and Mommy Mearest's design as a teaser for Week 4, ninjamuffin commented that the "nsfw artists eatin good tonite". The team were very aware of the type of reception she was going to get, and her third song was even named MILF — Mom I'd Like to Fuck — as a playful reference to it.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Week 5 was meant to be released alongside Week 4 during Christmas, but wasn't ready in time and was thus delayed until mid January.
  • Week 6 was the next to experience a delay, albeit by only one week.
  • The first update following the KickStarter was supposed to release on April 30th, 2022, in celebration of Pico Day, but was pushed back to June 11th as the team felt it needed more work, and then was pushed back again to an unknown date due to still needing more work. One of the new programmers hired after the KickStarter elaborated that the delay wasn't just because they were adding new content, but because they were overhauling the game's engine to make it easier to work with, as up to Week 7 it was still the quickly and shoddily programmed mess used for the game jam the game originated from.
• Sleeper Hit: The game was released with little fanfare during Ludum Dare 47 and didn't even manage to make it past the top 300 in the rankings: over the course of a few weeks, it rapidly gained popularity and is now easily the most well-known game out of the entire game jam.
• Trolling Creator:
  • The creators of the game have a tendency to jokingly refer to incredibly odd things as canon, such as Boyfriend being Hatsune Miku's brother and previously dating Pico. Fans take these in stride as most are legitimately interesting concepts and make for great fanart, and the creators in turn often embrace the ideas by retweeting said fan art.
  • In the lead up to Week 7's release, the team put out fake leaks of Ritz the Rat, a character from Ninjamuffin and Kawai Sprite's previous game Ritz, to throw people off on who the week was actually against. When the first song from Week 7 was released, very obviously featuring vocals by JohnnyUtah, Ninjamuffin posted a tweet laughing at those who bought the leaks: he then said they were legitimately planning on adding Ritz at some point, they just wanted to fuck with people first.
  • Ninjamuffin stated that Senpai was actually a teacher, not a student... only to then say that was a "random offhand comment" he tossed out because the fandom takes what he says too seriously, and he intentionally throws out fake lore sometimes to fuck with people. To that extent, he basically said not to put too much stock in any lore heard unless he repeats it multiple times.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Early plans for the game involved a battle system where the characters would directly interact with each other, having attack, dodge, and "get hurt" animations. They decided to stick with a more traditional Rhythm Game approach, though unused sprites for this battle system can be found in Boyfriend and Daddy Dearest's sprite gallery. The Full-Ass Game Kickstarter mentions these sprites while talking about additional mechanics, so reintroducing them in a later version isn't out of the window.
  • Girlfriend's idle animation was planned to have a part where she would swap which leg she was crossing; it got cut for time.
  • While the song "Monster" was fully implemented in the Tankman update, Monster's titular track was originally supposed to be added during the Halloween update, which introduced Week 2 where he is faced in. The reason he and the song wound up being left Dummied Out for so long was because the creators had difficulties properly developing the animation and coding in relation to the song, which ended up taking several months before they managed to complete and add it.
  • An initial concept for Week 5 was that Boyfriend and his opponent would be in separate elevators◊, Boyfriend's going up when he wins and the opponent's going down when they lose.
  • Senpai was planned to have one blue eye and one green eye as yet another reference to old school anime; due to his design, sprites, and animations being worked on by three separate people, this got lost in translation and he ended up with two blue eyes.
  • Hatsune Miku was originally planned to be a major character in the game, with the developers going as far as to reach out to Crypton Future Media (the owners of Hatsune Miku) to see if they can officially license her for the game. Unfortunately, they weren't able to get permission from them to use her in the game, causing them to scrap whatever plans they had for her. Her cameo in Week 5 remains, however.
  • Cassette Girl was originally planned to be the opponent for Week 8, with Week 8 itself releasing before the Kickstarter ended to drum up more hype for it. However, due to how hectic the Kickstarter was and the team already being heavily overworked, they decided to scrap that idea and do something else, with the Week instead focusing around an original character. Following the allegations against her creator, Cassette Girl was later completely scrapped from the game, both as an opponent and playable character.
  • Kawai Sprite made an original track for the Kickstarter trailer, but PhantomArcade didn't like how it sounded and opted for another song Kawai made, "Klaskii Romper".
• Word of God: As the game currently lacks cutscenes outside of Week 6 and Week 7, various story bits are instead explained by the creators.
  • Pico is a hitman and was hired by Daddy Dearest to kill Boyfriend - however, Pico has "history" with Boyfriend, and so challenges him to a rap battle instead.
  • Skid and Pump fight Boyfriend in Week 2 because Monster tricks them into bringing him Girlfriend in exchange for candy. The events of Week 2 also happen after Week 4, and the mansion the Week takes place in belongs to Girlfriend's parents.
  • Boyfriend and Girlfriend were sent into Senpai's game by Daddy Dearest, who was still sore about losing to Boyfriend and thus wanted to screw with him.
  • The context behind Week 7 is that Girlfriend's parents arrange a vacation for both her and her boyfriend, but the plane is a setup to get Boyfriend killed, only for that to ultimately fail, landing Boyfriend and Girlfriend in the Tankmen's Military Zone. Also, during the opening cutscene for Week 7's 3rd song, "Stress", Girlfriend was about to use her demonic powers when the Tankmen were about to shoot her until Pico jumped in and pushed her off the speakers, right into the Boyfriend's arms. As for why Pico was there, Girlfriend's parents hired him a second time to check the area and make sure Boyfriend was dead.
  • According to PhantomArcade in a tweet, Girlfriend uses hand-me-down iPhones given to her by her parents, while Boyfriend uses "$100 Android based monthly card phones". He regularly gets mad whenever the 3G internet sucks and throws them off a five-story window into oncoming traffic. The reply below mentions that Boyfriend has a habit of drawing PictoChat-esque dick pics on his Samsung Galaxy before its 5 kilobytes of free space crashes the phone and he "instinctively throws it 200 feet off his roof".
  • According to PhantomArcade in a livestream, Senpai is homophobic, but not outwardly. He is "the type of person who would put pronouns in his Twitter bio, but still call other people slurs".
  • Boyfriend is a natural cyanette.

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