just remembered the first time i heard of fnaf. i think it might have been during summer camp or some kind of break, i was at my preschool (no i was not in preschool anymore at that point, they had a summer camp and let kids go there on break, only up to a certain age i think like 13) and this boy, felix, was watching some fnaf video that had freddy in it, he was showing some kids and i wanted to see too, it was just a vid of freddys eyes flashing on the screen for a sec lol but i was really young back then, most of the kids there and me were probably around 8 considering the time fnaf came out. anyways at that point i didnt really know what fnaf was so i had no idea who freddy was, felix did of course, but i didnt. i dont remember when exactly i discovered it to be fnaf but i do remember how insanely popular it was, there was this boy we called RJ who really liked it and we would talk about it a lot, also i remember this specific discussion i had in summer camp in my elementary school i had with RJ and this older girl named alexandria. we had been discussing this animated fan video that went to the second the living tombstone fnaf song, "its been so long." pretty much we were just talking about the "lore" we got from that video (which i only found out was completely incorrect last year lmao.) its just kinda funny to think that i could probably go up to almost any kid and they would know what fnaf is, i remember in 7th grade (before covid, crazy to think its been almost like 2 years now? really feels like not that long ago) and i saw this boy with a fnaf backpack lol, ive probably seen some other kids with fnaf stuff before but he was just the most memorable since i was friends with him not that long ago. older people obviously knew about it too, just since i was younger i talked about it and saw other young kids talking about it too but it was obviously popular among the ages the game was intended for lmaoo. my older sister, shes like 4-5 years older than me also knew about it and we would listen to the living tombstone fnaf songs for the first and second game, one time when people used pandora instead of spotify "its been so long" played but she told me when it was practically over lol. also back then we could play the games for free since there were the demos, honestly i was suprised recently when i tried downloading it again and saw it costed money. ALSO we had these kids who lived at our house for a while, they knew about fnaf too cuz one of the kids, this boy was playing the second fnaf. i remember cuz he was confused about what happened so i went to see and pretty much he just got jumpscared by the puppet lol. a lot of other stories but this is already way too long
anyways sorry for the entire essay LMAO ive just been feeling nostalgic and fnaf has been a pretty big part of my childhood