You never know where life will take you. That is something you learn as you grow older, for sure, and for Scott Cawthon, realization came at the age of 36, when everything he had fought to create exploded into a thousand pieces and he realized that his true destiny was not to teach children how good Jesus Christ was, but to terrify and traumatize them with delirious horror games. Because he, who started as a programmer dedicated to Christian games, ended up being the author of Five Nights At Freddy’s for a very un-Christian reason: revenge.
Five Revenges At Freddy’s
Among fan versions of titles like Metroid and their own sagas (Bogart, Legacy of Flan, etc.), the games and movies they made aimed at a Christian audience stood out, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, Use Holy Water, or an app that simulated a Bible-themed slot machine called Bible Story Slots. To give you an idea, in 2014 alone they made 26 games, one every two weeks, which tells us two things. First, they were very devout. Second, none of them were exactly GTA 6.
Obviously, none of this provided him with enough money to support his wife and family, but he had no choice but to keep moving forward. Until the game of a young beaver arrived, who had to plant trees in order to gnaw on them and start creating logs to build with. Its title, Chipper & Sons’ Lumber Co. And it doesn’t matter that it was particularly good (it wasn’t), but because it was a turning point in his career: when he uploaded it to Steam Greenlight, YouTubers and influencers started laughing at him because his main character, far from looking friendly, was scary and resembled an animatronic with murderous intentions.
Imagine the situation: without a dollar, with all of the Internet laughing at him and trying to cling to his blind faith. What did he do? He sought revenge on all those who told him that Chipper and Sons’ Lumber Co was terrifying by creating a game that was intentionally going to be scary. It took him six months to create it, he used his family and friends as testers, and he ended up uploading it to Steam driven only by one desire: the desire for revenge. The good news? He ended up succeeding because of it.
Jesus Christ, help me!
On August 8, 2014, Cawthon uploaded his game to the Internet, with a bit of fear about the possible reaction. Very, very shortly after, it had already become a success: critics loved it, the reviewers who laughed at Chipper and Co were now doing Let’s Plays, and the world smiled at him for the first time. To succeed, he had only needed to find his true path: not the one of creating pretty beaver games, but the one of scaring children all over the world. And obviously, he wasn’t going to let that pass.
Only between 2014 and 2015, taking advantage of the speed he had gained by making Christian games, he ended up creating the first four foundational installments of Five Nights At Freddy’s, which then grew and grew in unexpected ways. Now, with his own studio, he seems to have calmed down, and releases a title every two years. Not much more is needed to remain in the spotlight.
Today, the Five Nights At Freddy’s franchise is vast. In addition to its eleven official games, there are eight spin-offs, fan-made material, novels, short stories, merchandise, and of course, the 2023 movie. And when Cawthon, whose fortune is now over 70 million dollars, looks at what he has built, he can proudly say that it was created with his hands full of anger, desolation, and a desire to defeat his enemies. As it should be.
