Five Night at Freddy's Fervor Causes Real-Life Fiasco

So as we discussed the other day, Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 has been announced, and predictably the fans are beside themselves with excitement. And not moments after the game was announced, fans began searching the web feverishly for some of the trademark clues that Five Night at Freddy’s creator Scott Clawson tends to hide, usually hinting at the kind of game it will be and the lore within it.

Well, for the first half of the search, things went well. Checking the HTML code of the official FNAF website revealed an interesting line, “Sc80t7t 8G8a78m8778es” which obviously isn’t exactly a great way to spell anything. But fans will recognize the repeated 8 and 7 numbers as clues to the infamous “Bite of 87” in the lore, where an unnamed animatronic bit down on a customer so hard it lobotomized them.

And that’s probably where it should have stopped. It tells us the game is a prequel, most likely, it focuses on the bite, and everyone would be satisfied until the next hinting reveal.

...but that’s not where it ended. Not by a longshot. Because some inquisitive fans thought that perhaps the repeated use of 8 and 7 wasn’t JUST a clue about the bite of 87’, they suspected it might ALSO be coordinates for a physical location. And, in the mother of all coincidences, when those numbers are jammed into Google—it takes you to a mom-and-pop pizza place in Virginia.

Even crazier? A review of the pizza place (placed three weeks before the announcement of FNAF 4) said, and I quote...

“THE ROBOTS KILL! I saw a ro bot fox killing a kid before in there run for your live’s out of there”

Yeah.

Fans exploded. People started calling the pizza place in droves looking for more information about Five Nights at Freddy’s 4, which would have been cool, except this was an ACTUAL pizza place, the owners had no idea what anyone was talking about, and the review placed three weeks earlier was just one of a dozen troll reviews of mom-and-pop pizza stores you can find all around the world, written by fans to freak other fans out.

The backlash following was so intense the Five Nights reddit page is basically on shutdown. Mentioning the pizza place will earn you a temporary ban, and Scott had go actively plea with fans to stop harassing the owners of that pizza place.

“The number sequence was a coincidence, nothing more. I’ve said this before; there are NO phone numbers associated with this game. Please do not try to call phone numbers that you think you have found hidden; you will only call businesses and homes that have no idea what you’re talking about. Thanks.”

So the Reddit is effectively locked down at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll recover before too long. In the meantime, I’ll have to get my fix elsewhere.