8 Video Games That Caught Lightning In A Bottle

It's easy to picture an alternate reality where Five Nights at Freddy's simply came and went in the blink of an eye, but developer Scott Cawthon's survival horror game was released in 2014 just as Let's Plays and game streaming were reaching huge levels of popularity.

Horror games were especially well positioned for this, as viewers enjoyed watching their favourite streamers react to a game's jump scares, even if they were too afraid to play the game themselves.

And Five Nights at Freddy's was at the cutting edge of this trend, aided by its general lack of gore which made it more easily accessible to younger viewers.

This, coupled with the game's strange, mysterious lore, allowed it to amass a colossal fanbase in a reasonably short period of time, leading to not only a commercially successful run of video games, but a massive merchandising empire and, most recently, a hit movie.

It's telling that while countless horror games have attempted to emulate FNAF's success, it became a mega-hit totally organically, coinciding fortuitously with the prominence of streamer culture and reaction content.