Five Nights at Freddy’s, a cultural gaming giant big enough to have its own movie (that was apparently Just Okay, according to critics) has come to Roblox—wait, hold on a second, it’s gone. Now it’s in beta? Oh, but the beta’s been “taken down for a few weeks.” Err.
The whole thing was a comic misunderstanding according to the series’ creator Scott Cawthon (thanks, IGN) who is otherwise retired after significant donations to right-wing parties brought him under fire from LGBTQ+ members of his fanbase. In a response on the game’s subreddit, Cawthon writes:
“Yes, there is an official Roblox game being worked on; I’m actually a big Roblox fan and play it a lot with my kids. But the fact that this was released today is one of the most baffling, insane, things to ever happen in my ten years of working on FNAF.”
Cawthon maintains that the game was in its “infancy” and never supposed to come out in the first place: “apparently there was a huge misunderstanding when I approved a skin, and it was interpreted as RELEASE THE GAME.” Which is an interesting snafu, since you’d think the people making the game would have the most knowledge on whether it was releasable or not. They could’ve checked. This game release could’ve been an email.
“I obviously took the game down immediately,” he adds. “I will fix in 2024. Again, I hope everyone can at least believe me when I say that this was a game in its testing phases and was in no way ready to be released to the public.”
Best I can tell from the footage of this thing, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Survival Crew appears to have been a Dead by Daylight-style multiplayer game where Roblox characters try to avoid the Fazbear himself. Only, it’s severely under-polished—here’s a good example, courtesy of Twitter user and FNAF YouTuber PlainTrace.
Despite this, the game’s developers put a big BETA stamp on it, and appear to be treating the whole thing as a test. The game itself is being developed by Metaverse Team Frights. There’s a Discord server, but you can’t chat in it—because, as players observed, it devolved into complete NSFW anarchy. I’ve have a couple of examples here courtesy of Calad.
The second image here includes straight-up pornography and erotica, so I’ve taken the liberty of censoring it with some black bars and my Baldur’s Gate 3 character.
With the caution of someone stepping onto a minefield, I decided to poke my head in to see if the anarchy was still ongoing, and was met with this: first, an insistence that the game was a beta rather than an accidental release, in direct contradiction to Cawthon’s words. Second, an announcement that the game would be disabled “until [it] comes back for beta.”
Every single channel has been scrubbed clean. There’s even an initial announcement from December 18 that still shows two “#Unknown” channel links. I feel like I’ve just sleepwalked into a hidden government base somewhere and found a bunch of files blotted out with black REDACTED ink. How the Five Nights at Freddy’s: Survival Crew situation develops from here will be interesting to say the least, if this cursed object even comes out at all.
