Fazbear Frights #5: Bunny Call

In The Flesh

Matt redirects the residual anger over his many failed relationships into a video game, and ends up birthing the horrible consequences

You're so lucky. You just get to sit around and play video games all day."

If Matt had a dollar for every time someone had said this to him, he actually could sit around and play video games all day instead of going into the office and working on developing the things.

Game development was harder than people thought. It was a great job—

the job Matt had always dreamed of back when he was a kid pretending to be sick so he could stay home from school and make simple games on his family's home computer. But there was a huge difference between working on games and playing them. Many parts of the process were exhilarating—

that first burst of inspiration when an idea came to you, the triumphant moment when you saw all of your plans come to fruition. But between first inspiration and final fulfillment, there were lots of opportunities for head-banging frustration and punching-a-fist-through-the-wall rage. One small programming error could mess up a whole game, and backtracking to try to identify such an error was incredibly tedious. People who loved to play games often thought their skills in gaming gave them the skills to design games as well, but this wasn't any truer than thinking that since you knew how to read a good book, you also knew how to write one.

For now Matt was eating, sleeping, and breathing his job. He had landed the role of creating and refining the AI in Springtrap's Revenge, a new cutting-edge virtual reality game that was to be the next installment in the popular Five Nights at Freddy's series. It was the most high-profile game he had ever worked on, and he knew it was going to be a tremendous hit. How could it not be, with the exciting combination of virtual reality and the established Five Nights at Freddy's characters that gamers already loved to fear? The early glitches of the game had been worked out, and now Matt was about to do what nongamers assumed the only part of his job was: he was getting to play-test the game.

Matt secured the VR headset over his eyes and made sure the whole device fit him tightly. He was going in.

There was a wall on either side of him. These walls formed the dark hallway that was the entrance to the maze. At this point Matt could only see down the hall straight ahead; no entrances to the left or right were visible yet. Just as he was about to move forward, he saw his creation and his adversary—a large green rabbit—appear at the end of the hall and then exit to the left.

Just because it was a rabbit didn't mean it was cute. Matt had always found humans in rabbit costumes creepy, as was evidenced by an old picture his mom had taken of him when he was three years old, screaming bloody murder on the lap of a blankly grinning Easter Bunny at the mall.

Springtrap, the rabbit in the game, was even scarier than the uncanny–

valley–dwelling mall Easter Bunny. Its costume was so tattered that some of its mechanical parts were visible beneath the fabric, and the better part of one ear was missing. Its eyes were evil orbs that glowed green when it spotted its prey, and its grin was wide and ghastly. It was definitely nightmare fuel, which was absolutely what Matt had intended for it to be.

Matt was especially proud of his titular character. He wanted to make Springtrap the kind of horrifying character who would endure, who would visit people's nightmares for generations to come. From Dracula to Hannibal Lecter, there was a kind of immortality in a truly horrifying creation, and somehow a bit of this immortality touched the creator as well.