I'm sure plenty of you have known about the recent takedown of a FNaF fangame titled LEGO FNaF, and I'm sure it probably has caused some worry around fangames using copyrighted material, this includes Phobia.

If you want to read more on the whole LEGO FNaF situation, you can read that here.

To put it short, the game got take down by LEGO themselves due to it obviously using copyrighted material. This is unfortunate, but I can understand why they did it. Even the devs sort of knew this could happen, though they thought it would have been done by Scott Cawthon and not LEGO. Apparently there's been a small amount of other fangames that have been taken down for the same reasons in the past as well.

I've always had this whole copyright thing in the back of my head when I released The Awakening over a year ago, and honestly, I'm not too worried about it, whether it gets taken down or not.

Why?

Phobia only uses so little of The Wiggles related material, it doesn't use their official logo, their other characters, and not even their music. Phobia has a very different universe when it comes down to including The Wiggles in it. There was no real band of people. They all originated as a successful puppet show that was later turned into a pizzeria, according to a random loading screen text in The Awakening. There are references to the last names of the real people in The Wiggles, but those are there as easter eggs and nothing more. If the games were so much closer to the source material I think it would have been taken down by now, but maybe not, who knows.

So why would I not be too worried if they did get taken down?

First off, Phobia started as never released joke games in a PlayStation game titled Little Big Planet 3. The Wiggles puppets were in those games only because they looked scary and I was just having fun, not because I wanted to make an actual The Wiggles FNaF fangame. If you want to see more about all of those older games to get more clarity, you can check this post I made a while back here.

The reason why The Wiggles are still in these new games is because:

1. The Awakening was never going to be released to the public, but later I decided otherwise.

2. Phobia had those characters in the old games for so long that I just wanted to keep it like that. After all, I was still just having fun remaking the old games in a real game engine and improving pretty much everything.

A fangame like Five Nights at Chuck E Cheese's could not survive without Chuck E Cheese, and a fangame like Five Nights at Sonic's could not survive without Sonic.

Phobia could totally survive without The Wiggles.

I kind of wish I changed the characters long ago since the whole The Wiggles thing was only just there for fun and nothing more. Sometimes I feel as though people turn away from Phobia just because it has The Wiggles in it, but I do know that SO many people really love the game for that reason, and that does make me really happy! It does make me a bit sad though, since I'm not planning on adding anything else The Wiggles related and likely won't ever change my mind on that (for a good reason), and I know that might disappoint and confuse people.

So, what happens if Phobia somehow does get taken down?

I'll be taking a step back for a while first, but I would take the time to redesign all The Wiggles characters into something else and also go through the work of changing anything else related to them. I have ideas in my head on how I could change them, and they'd still be completely inspired by the puppets, so no worries about that. If anything, they'll just be new creepy human animatronic characters that would fit right in with what you see in Phobia and would still have some tiny references to who they used to be. They look pretty cool in my head, and I may even still model them out for fun someday! Characters like Mark, The Figure, Cloggy the Clown and all of his weird friends would stay as they are because they're my own creations. It would be a long process, but it's not impossible in the slightest. It would even allow me to maybe make other stuff look even better, too.

I would change the characters now if I really wanted to, but I know that's why many people liked Phobia in the first place, and changing the characters, even if it's for the best, would no doubt make people upset, and I don't plan on doing that unless the games get taken down for copyright reasons. OR, if a majority of people would prefer it that way, but I highly doubt that.

But don't get me wrong, I like having The Wiggles in it, even if it's in this whole weird world I've made for them. If anything, it makes it more fun for me to work with! The Wiggles were a big part of my early childhood, but again the reason why they're still in these games was because I was so used to having them in it with this whole "alternate universe" idea in my head. If I were to actually try to make a REAL The Wiggles themed FNaF fangame, it would be totally different.

Like, The Wiggles probably would never open a pizzeria with animatronics in it to begin with.