Five Nights at Freddy's was created by Scott Cawthon, which began with the eponymous 2014 video game Five Nights at Freddy's. The series puts you...
Five Nights at Freddy's Series
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Five Nights at Freddy's started in August 2014 as a small indie horror game from Scott Cawthon, built in Clickteam Fusion and sold on Desura and Steam. He was one guy with a drag-and-drop game maker. The whole premise fits on a pizza box: you are the night guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, the shift runs midnight to 6 AM, and four animatronic mascots are wandering the halls looking for you. All you get is a set of security cameras, two doors, and a power meter that only goes down.
Nobody expected what came next. That tiny game turned into more than a dozen sequels and spin-offs, two Blumhouse movies, a shelf of novels and graphic novels, and crossovers with Dead by Daylight and Fortnite. And underneath the jump scares, Cawthon hid a genuinely disturbing story about a child murderer named William Afton. He told it in fragments: garbled phone calls, Atari-style minigames, frames hidden a single shade too dark. Fans spent years piecing it together.
This page covers all of it. The games in release order, the lore, the movies, the books, the crossovers, and what is coming next.
Before Freddy Fazbear, Scott Cawthon spent years making small Christian and family games. The turning point was Chipper and Sons Lumber Co., a wholesome little game about beavers. Players said the beavers looked like creepy animatronics. The criticism stung at first. Then Cawthon did the smartest thing a developer can do with a bad review: he built an entire game out of it.
For the first few years, FNAF was a one-man show. Cawthon wrote, designed, and shipped the games himself, sometimes only months apart. That changed with Help Wanted in 2019, when he teamed up with Steel Wool Studios. They have been the main developer ever since.
Cawthon stepped back from public-facing game development in 2021. He still owns the franchise and stayed involved behind the scenes, including a co-writing credit on the first movie's screenplay.
Most of the mainline games trap you in one place, managing resources and watching for animatronics. The later ones open up into free-roam exploration, VR, and side-scrolling adventures. Release order is still the easiest way to follow how the story evolved.
The original is still the purest version of the idea. You are Mike Schmidt, the new night guard. Two doors. Two hallway lights. Every camera check and every closed door drains the same power supply, and when it hits zero the office goes dark while Freddy's face flickers in the doorway to the Toreador March. A recorded message from Phone Guy plays at the start of each night, half training video and half warning, casually mentioning the Bite of '87 like it was a workers' comp claim. The game launched on Steam in August 2014 and later came to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and mobile.
This game was hard, but it also glitched on me. On one of the nights, the screen froze while the clock kept running, so I finished the night without doing anything but waiting.
Three months later, Cawthon dropped the sequel. FNAF 2 is a prequel set in 1987, and it takes your doors away. Your defense is an empty Freddy Fazbear head you wear to fool the animatronics, plus a music box you have to keep wound or the Puppet climbs out of its box. The shiny new Toy animatronics share the pizzeria with the rotting Withered versions of the original cast, along with Mangle and Balloon Boy. The death minigames start filling in the murders behind everything, with the Puppet placing children's souls into the animatronics.
March 2015. Thirty years later. Fazbear's Fright is a horror attraction built from salvaged pizzeria junk, cashing in on the legend. There is only one real animatronic this time: Springtrap. The phantom versions of the old cast cannot kill you, but their hallucinations knock out your cameras, audio, and ventilation at the worst possible moments. The minigames finally show the Purple Guy, later confirmed as William Afton, tearing the animatronics apart while the ghosts of his victims close in. He panics, hides inside a Spring Bonnie suit, and the springlocks do exactly what springlocks do.
Cawthon marketed this one as The Final Chapter. It was not, but in July 2015 it sure felt like an ending. The pizzeria is gone. You are a kid in a bedroom, listening at two doors with a flashlight, checking the closet and the bed while the Nightmare animatronics close in. Nightmare Fredbear. Nightmare. The minigames follow the Crying Child, tormented by his older brother in a Foxy mask, until the prank goes wrong at Fredbear's Family Diner and Fredbear's jaws shut on the kid's head. Fans call it the Bite of '83. They are still arguing about what it means.
January 2016 gave us the weird one: FNAF World, a cutesy RPG spin-off. Cawthon admitted he shipped it before it was ready, pulled it from Steam, and re-released a fixed version free on Game Jolt.
October brought the series back to horror with Sister Location. Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental is a different kind of nightmare: an underground facility run by Afton Robotics, where you play a technician instead of a guard. His nickname is Eggs Benedict. His real name is Michael Afton, William's son. Circus Baby, Ballora, Funtime Freddy, and Funtime Foxy eventually merge into a single thing called Ennard. And Circus Baby is carrying the soul of Elizabeth Afton, William's daughter.
Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator launched free on Steam in December 2017, disguised as a cheerful restaurant tycoon game. The tycoon part is real, for a while. Then the salvage nights start, and Molten Freddy, Scrap Baby, Scraptrap, and Lefty come through the back door. Lefty is secretly carrying the Puppet inside it. The ending pulls the rug out: the whole pizzeria is a trap built by Henry Emily, Afton's former business partner, to lure every remaining animatronic into one building and burn it to the ground. Henry's closing monologue was meant to be the end of the Afton saga.
Ultimate Custom Night followed in June 2018. No story, just a nightmare toybox: set the AI levels of 50 animatronics from across the series and try to survive. The hidden cutscenes strongly suggest you are playing as William Afton, trapped in his own personal hell.
This is when Steel Wool Studios took over development. Help Wanted launched in May 2019 for PC VR and PlayStation VR, with a flat-screen mode coming later. The framing is clever: you are playing the Freddy Fazbear Virtual Experience, a VR game Fazbear Entertainment built to convince the public the old stories were just fiction. The hidden tapes tell a different story. Buried in the code is Glitchtrap, a digital remnant of William Afton's consciousness, waiting for someone to let it out. The Curse of Dreadbear DLC followed that October, and Illumix released the AR spin-off Special Delivery in November.
Security Breach launched in December 2021 and blew the formula open. No more office. You get the entire Mega Pizzaplex to roam, playing as Gregory, a kid trapped inside overnight. Glamrock Freddy is on your side. Glamrock Chica, Montgomery Gator, Roxanne Wolf, and the human Vanny are not. The launch was rough, with bugs everywhere, and Steel Wool spent months patching it.
The free Ruin DLC arrived in July 2023. Cassie heads into the wrecked Pizzaplex looking for Gregory, and the DLC introduces the Mimic as the franchise's next major villain.
Steel Wool went back to VR with Help Wanted 2 in December 2023: job simulations inside the Pizzaplex, from food prep to backstage work, all of it trying to kill you.
For the 10th anniversary in August 2024, Mega Cat Studios released Into the Pit, adapted from one of the Fazbear Frights stories. You play Oswald, a bored kid who finds a ball pit in a dead pizzeria and climbs out in 1985. A yellow rabbit is waiting for him there.
Secret of the Mimic launched in June 2025 from Steel Wool, and it is a prequel about the monster itself. The setting is Murray's Costume Manor. The story digs into Edwin Murray, the inventor who built the Mimic: an endoskeleton designed to learn by copying whatever is around it. There is more exploration and puzzle-solving here than in Security Breach, but the core is the same. Something is hunting you in tight spaces.
Through the Fazbear Fanverse initiative, Cawthon funds and officially publishes the best FNAF fan games. myPOPGOES came to PC in 2024 for the 10th anniversary, a tiny caretaker game styled after the handheld LCD toys of the 2000s, and it hit Xbox, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch on October 8, 2026. Five Laps at Freddy's, a kart racing spin-off, is still listed for 2026.
The full timeline is scattered across games, books, hidden screens, and audio logs, and fans still fight about parts of it. The broad shape has settled, though, and nearly all of it leads back to one man.
William Afton co-founded Fazbear Entertainment with Henry Emily, then used the company's restaurants as hunting grounds. His first victim was Charlotte Emily, Henry's own daughter. Her soul ended up in the Puppet. Then came the Missing Children Incident: Afton lured five kids into a back room at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and killed them. Their souls went into Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and Golden Freddy. That is why the animatronics attack adults at night. They are not malfunctioning. They are angry.
The springlock failure at the end of FNAF 3 should have been the end of Afton. It was not. He spent decades rotting inside the Spring Bonnie suit as Springtrap. Henry's fire in Pizzeria Simulator was supposed to finish him. It did not. He came back as Glitchtrap, a digital echo hiding in the Help Wanted code, and later as Burntrap, a rebuilt body stitched together from his remains deep under the Pizzaplex. Along the way, Glitchtrap got inside Vanny's head and turned her into his hands in the real world.
The Afton family sits at the center of the whole tragedy. The Crying Child from FNAF 4 is William's youngest, killed when his older brother's birthday prank put his head in Fredbear's mouth. That brother is widely accepted to be Michael Afton. Michael spends Sister Location and Pizzeria Simulator trying to undo what his father did, ending up as the guard who helps Henry spring the trap. Elizabeth Afton, the daughter, got too close to Circus Baby and never came back. Her soul stayed with the animatronic.
The Mimic took over as the main villain after Security Breach: Ruin and the Tales from the Pizzaplex books. Edwin Murray built it as a learning endoskeleton for costume work. It copies everything around it. Including violence. That is what makes it scary in a way Afton never was: there is no ghost in the machine, no soul to free. It is just a machine that learned the wrong things. Secret of the Mimic pushed the series past a decade of Afton and into something new.
Freddy Fazbear is the brown bear frontman and the face of the franchise. Bonnie is the purple bunny with the guitar, and in the first game he is usually the first one at your door. Chica is the yellow chicken with Mr. Cupcake and a bib that reads Let's Eat. Foxy is the pirate fox behind the Pirate's Cove curtain. Ignore your cameras too long and you will hear him sprinting down the hallway. Golden Freddy is the slumped yellow suit that appears in your office without warning. Even now, it is the strangest jump scare in the series.
Every era added its own cast: the Toy and Withered animatronics in FNAF 2, the Nightmares in FNAF 4, the Funtimes in Sister Location, the Glamrocks in Security Breach. Beyond the original four, the ones that matter most are Springtrap, the Puppet, Circus Baby, Ennard, Glamrock Freddy, and the Mimic.
The FNAF movie spent years stuck in development hell. Blumhouse and Universal finally got it made. Emma Tammi directed both movies, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop built the animatronics for real. No CGI suits. Actual puppets.
The first movie opened October 27, 2023, in theaters and on Peacock the same day. Josh Hutcherson plays Mike Schmidt, a down-on-his-luck security guard raising his little sister Abby, played by Piper Rubio. Elizabeth Lail is Vanessa, a police officer who knows more about the pizzeria than she lets on. Matthew Lillard shows up as career counselor Steve Raglan, who turns out to be William Afton. Scott Cawthon co-wrote the screenplay. It earned close to \$300 million worldwide, which is absurd for a horror movie that was streaming on day one.
The sequel opened December 5, 2025, picking up a year after the first movie. Hutcherson, Lail, and Rubio are back, and the Toy animatronics join the cast. Matthew Patrick, better known as MatPat from Game Theory, voices Toy Bonnie. Kellen Goff voices Toy Freddy. Skeet Ulrich plays Henry Emily, with Wayne Knight, McKenna Grace, Teo Briones, and Freddy Carter as Michael rounding things out. It opened to \$64 million domestically, well above projections, and started streaming on Peacock on April 3, 2026.
The third movie is in development with no release date. Matthew Lillard has said the plan is to start filming in 2027. A report from June 2026 claimed Gary Dauberman, known for IT and Annabelle, was brought on to write the script in place of Scott Cawthon. That has not been officially confirmed. Emma Tammi is expected to return as director.
The books run on their own continuity, separate from the games. The Silver Eyes, co-written by Scott Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley, arrived in 2015: an adult Charlie returns to her hometown, and it gets worse from there. The Twisted Ones and The Fourth Closet finished the trilogy. Then came Fazbear Frights, a horror anthology of short stories, a few of which fed straight back into the games. Into the Pit started as one of those stories. Tales from the Pizzaplex carried the anthology format into the Security Breach era and laid the groundwork for the Mimic. The graphic novel adaptations keep coming, with new Tales from the Pizzaplex collections releasing through 2026.
Dead by Daylight got FNAF as Chapter 36 on June 17, 2025. Behaviour Interactive called it the most requested license in the game's history, which tracks. Springtrap joined as the killer, going by The Animatronic, and the chapter added a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza map. The Security Doors are the fun part: both the killer and survivors can use them to move around the map. The Yellow Rabbit outfit uses Matthew Lillard's actual likeness with new voice lines, and there is a Glitchtrap outfit pulled straight from Help Wanted.
Fortnite got its turn for Fortnitemares 2026, starting October 1 in Chapter 7 Season 4. Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy arrived as skins, each with a Withered style that shows battle damage as you take hits. Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria joined the map. The reveal trailer even showed players transforming into the animatronics after defeating them.
FNAF and YouTube grew up together. Markiplier's Let's Plays turned the first game's jump scares into viral moments back in 2014, and the series never left the platform. The Living Tombstone's Five Nights at Freddy's song became part of the franchise's DNA. It even plays at the end of the Fortnite reveal trailer. MatPat spent years untangling the lore on Game Theory, then ended up voicing Toy Bonnie in the second movie. That is about as perfect a full circle as this franchise gets. And when fan games got too good to ignore, Cawthon created the Fazbear Fanverse to give the best ones an official release.
FNAF 3 is expected to start filming in 2027. Five Laps at Freddy's is still listed for 2026. And in 2027, a permanent Freddy Fazbear's Pizza opens at American Dream in East Rutherford, New Jersey: a real restaurant, with real animatronics, in a real mall. After 12 years, Freddy Fazbear and the rest of the band show no sign of clocking out.
Five Nights at Freddy's was created by Scott Cawthon, which began with the eponymous 2014 video game Five Nights at Freddy's. The series puts you...
Scott Cawthon created Five Nights at Freddy's and released the first game in August 2014. He wrote and developed the early games largely on his own before partnering with Steel Wool Studios and other developers.
The main series includes Five Nights at Freddy's 1 through 4, Sister Location, Pizzeria Simulator, Ultimate Custom Night, Help Wanted, Security Breach, Help Wanted 2, Into the Pit, and Secret of the Mimic, plus spin-offs like FNAF World, Special Delivery, and myPOPGOES.
Release order works best, starting with Five Nights at Freddy's in 2014 and moving through FNAF 2, FNAF 3, FNAF 4, Sister Location, Pizzeria Simulator, Ultimate Custom Night, Help Wanted, Security Breach, Help Wanted 2, Into the Pit, and Secret of the Mimic.
William Afton is the main villain of Five Nights at Freddy's. He murdered children at Fazbear Entertainment restaurants, and their souls went on to possess the animatronics.
Springtrap is William Afton after the springlocks in a Spring Bonnie suit failed and crushed him inside it. He first appears in Five Nights at Freddy's 3 and later became the killer The Animatronic in Dead by Daylight.
The Bite of '87 is an incident Phone Guy mentions in the first Five Nights at Freddy's, where an animatronic bit a person and damaged their frontal lobe. It is separate from the Bite of '83 shown in Five Nights at Freddy's 4.
Both Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) and Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025) stream on Peacock. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 arrived on Peacock on April 3, 2026.
Five Nights at Freddy's 3 is in development with filming expected to start in 2027, according to Matthew Lillard. No release date has been announced.
Five Nights at Freddy's came to Fortnite on October 1, 2026, for Fortnitemares, adding Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy skins and a Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria location.
Springtrap joined Dead by Daylight as The Animatronic on June 17, 2025, along with a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza map.