Start some things off—Foxy’s Night (AKA Behind the Curtain) just hit 1,000,000 views today on YouTube. I can’t begin to process this, I’m currently having a breakdown in the middle of my local Ralph’s, but here goes my best attempts to wrangle my thoughts:

ARTICLE STARTS HERE:

When I started FNAF: In Real Time, my biggest interest was to get into filmmaking at the time.

Bring it back—My original passion from 4-10 was ALWAYS game making, but from growing up in California and begin in the world of entertainment all around you, I always, genuinely thought it would be too impossible to try and develop my own game. So I thought of the “second best thing”, fuck yeah I could make movies!

Yeah, that’s so much harder HAHA. Movies, once I jumped into the possibility of filming, directing, writing a movie… that also quickly made me feel like, that too as a medium would slip through my fingers and I’d never have a chance into telling the stories I’d want to tell.

I then thought maybe I could edit those movies,

And then maybe just edit the trailers for movies,

And then I thought maybe I could just score the trailers for those movies,

And then I quickly fell into a sinking hole of…

“Everything I could possibly want to do, I am not able to do.”

Unfortunately out of everything, I feel like that’s probably the most shared experience we have as creative people, and people who are self owned creatives.

But this is also the era I started to get into Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Side bar: It’s fucking NUTS to think FNAF released 11 years ago. You know what we were doing 11 years ago? YouTube Rewind. HOW THE FUCK DID WE GET HERE.

But to not linger too long off the point, or spread out the message hidden—despite the years going past, and the sort or hold I had on myself that assumed any endeavor into game development, or maybe making a film, or really anything creative in general would be futile (which probably was also a mix of self doubt with dealing with my neurodivergence), somehow I am here, 10 years later, having the privilege to write a post about celebrating something I can’t count in one sitting out loud…

Unless you are Mr. Beast.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is one of the main examples of indie-creator (game dev) taking something so simple, that now we consider timeless, and creating a household name for the franchise and the characters that they’ve created.

I don’t know why after all these years, I didn’t somehow realize or convince myself back then that “If Scott was proof that anyone could possibly achieve their dreams like that, I could too!!!!”—Because I still think this community I have and the opportunities I’ve had making FNAF: IRT (and now into making my OWN original IP?? WHAT??!) is far from what anyone could have ever expected from me.

…But, dude, side bar with me here, of course not everyone CAN or DOES “make it” just like that as an indie artist OR someone in this industry. It’s important to factor in gender, privilege, systemic racism- but also just all around **luck**. You need to have LUCK!

I just still don’t know how to process how lucky I really am, and how much I owe that to my friends, and to you, and to even everyone who spent way too much time trying to convince you this game run on mobile, because it does NOT.

FNAF: IRT 2 never, stop asking (unless? 🥺) -NO

I love you guys, I hope you guys can see what we’ve been doing on PPW in the next month or so.

❤️