That One Time There Was a Toontown FNAF Parody
July 23rd 2023
So, I had no ideas on stuff to write about on this site's blog, and for that reason I'm just digging into my memory vaults for the dumbest possible content to write about.
For our first post, let's talk about obscure Toontown history. Yeah, that one dead Disney MMO.
Disney's Toontown Online closed down in 2013, but from its ashes many private servers spawned across the years. One of them being the infamous Toontown House
This Toontown private server was one of the earliest to ever exist, along with Toontown Rewritten and Toontown Infinite. And I somehow landed myself a position on its staff team back in 2014.
Toontown House was definitely not the best in terms of quality, but it was absolutely ambitious and had several random features that some of its competition hadn't accomplished yet, but the most important for this blog post was its completely deranged parody of Five Nights at Freddy's
2014 was the release of FNAF, and it quickly proved to be one of the best horror games of its time. And due to that quick popularity spike, several tons of fangames for it were spawning all around.
And that's when I recall the lead developer of Toontown House showing up unprompted in our Skype chat used for development saying he had put together a recreation of FNAF in Panda3D (Toontown's Engine)
From there, the next course of action was obvious. Put that thing into our actual game, release it for everyone to see and get high player traffic from a meme parody that would do numbers for maybe a week. And thus, Five Nights at The Factory was born.
There aren't many traces left of Five Nights at The Factory in the internet, but you can still watch a video of it here and you can actually find an open source version of the parody on Github here
Five Nights at the Factory was by no means good or fun to play, but it definitely caught the attention of the Toontown community for being absolutely hilarious a parody. The game was even eventually ported to another Toontown private server (Of which I also worked for. Whoops.)
Out of my own will there was also an unfinished sequel for Five Nights at The Factory completely divorced from Toontown's Engine, which you can see here
I still don't know why I'm writing about this, but I hope someone out there reads this and finds it as funny as I found the fangame to be back in the day.