Five Nights At Freddy's Is Based On A Tragic True Story - A Wild Rumor Explained
The following article contains detailed discussions of a mass shooting
Scott Cawthon's "Five Nights at Freddy's" franchise is massive. What began as an indie horror video game grew into a popular series that exploded into a global phenomenon. There are toys and books and clothing brands, and now there's even a Blumhouse Productions film starring Josh Hutcherson and Matthew Lillard. The throughline that loosely connects the games, the books, and the movie is how a serial killer used a restaurant's mascot costume to get close to children and kill them. There's also a throughline of those children possessing the restaurant's mascot costumes and animatronics to seek deadly revenge.
For perhaps understandable reasons, the fanbase drew a dotted line between Cawthon's "FNAF" and Chuck E. Cheese. For those who don't know, CEC is a real restaurant chain that caters to children through pizza, mascot characters, and vaguely disturbing animatronics — change the name to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and slap a little top hat on Charles Entertainment Cheese, and hey, it's like looking in a mirror! But a certain vocal subset of fans believe that the connections between "FNAF" and CEC run deeper.
On December 14, 1993, ex-employee Nathan Dunlap entered a CEC in Aurora, Colorado, and killed employees Sylvia Crowell, Ben Grant, Margaret Kohlberg, and Colleen O'Connor, severely injuring a fifth, Bobby Stephens. It is believed by some that Cawthon was inspired by this mass shooting event to fashion "FNAF" but no hard evidence exists to support the theory. Literally none. Speaking of theories, there's another reason so many consider the connection to exist.
Game Theorist Matthew Patrick made the connection in 2014
In the beginning, before "Five Nights at Freddy's" rose from an indie game to a full-blown movie, it attracted the attention of YouTube content creators, many of whom formed a successful symbiotic relationship with the growing franchise and grew along with it. Seriously, YouTubers are so integral to the success of "FNAF" that many of the most popular creators associated with Scott Cawthon's game landed cameos in the film. The guy knows how to pay it backward.
In 2014, Matthew Patrick — aka MatPat — of "The Game Theorists," a YouTube lore/theory channel dedicated to analyzing video games, published a video that noted the similarities between "FNAF" and the 1993 mass shooting event at Chuck E. Cheese. It's important to mention that nowhere in the video does he claim a concrete connection between the two things but he outlines several points that line up suspiciously well.
Fast forward to 2023, and MatPat's multiple YouTube channels collectively feature more than 40 million subscribers, with approximately half of that number belonging to his flagship channel "The Game Theorists." His video noting the parallels between "FNAF" and the mass shooting boasts more than 32 million views. Since the first "FNAF" game came out on August 4, 2014, and MatPat published his theory on October 23, 2014, and since the internet moved slightly slower back then, it's not unreasonable to assume that he's the progenitor of that rumor.
Yes, it's possible that Cawthon found inspiration in reality but even MatPat acknowledged that there's no definitive proof. Cawthon himself has never officially spoken about the mass shooting, nor has anyone asked him about it in an official capacity. Despite this, the theory persists because ideas never die, they only fester and grow.