Friday Night Funkin – Facts
Friday Night Funkin’ is as indie of an indie game as you can get. It was originally made as a prototype for a 48-hour game jam but despite those humble beginnings, it’s a game that now needs no introduction based on how popular it’s become over the last few months.
In Fnf you play as “boyfriend” whose one and only mission is to hook up with girlfriend. And yes, their names are confirmed to canonically be boyfriend and girlfriend. Anything else is just for the in-laws along the way.
Your quest for attaining love will be challenged by girlfriend’s Dad, aka “Daddy Dearest”, along with her
Mom, “Mommy Mearest”. You’ll also meet all sorts of other antagonists along the way. You need to win them over with your “sick flow” as you battle rap with them in a Dance Dance Revolution-style game.
Friday Night Funkin‘ is a love letter to a bygone era, an era before Youtube. Newgrounds was the big thing back then, and some of the biggest internet creators. A site made back in the ’90s that was originally a digital version of a magazine, Newgrounds is essentially what happens when you grab a bunch of bored teenagers with loads of free time and a decent internet connection and hand them total creative freedom.
Newgrounds was, and still is, in a lot of ways the place you turned to to see games that were too raw, too random, and too violent for the mainstream. As well as parody videos of your favourite characters doing questionable things and where you adjusted your age settings late into the night to see what was behind those big red “A” rated videos.
Remember, this was back in the ’90s and early 2000s when most of us had never even heard of concepts like brand safety and there was no worry of getting demonetized because, well, none of it was monetized in the first place. We were making stuff just to make stuff.
Lore
Friday Night Funkin’ has lore beyond just the blue-haired guy (boyfriend) wants to get the girl. We know via “Ask Me Anythings” on Reddit with the game’s creators that there’s an overarching story here. Each week has a reason for existing, even the episodes without any dialogue. Also, you can expect some big reveals, so read on!
Have you ever wondered why the heck Mommy and Daddy Dearest attack a Mall Santa in week five? Or where the hell the Lemon Demon comes from?
Also, the way the weeks are presented in-game is misleading. Sure they’re numbered one to seven, but from a lore perspective, this isn’t an accurate timeline of events. For example, according to Phantom Arcade, the content in week 2 is supposed to come after week 4.
Daddy Dearest and Pico
The first week, chronologically, Boyfriend battles Daddy Dearest who apparently doesn’t take too kindly to the idea of his daughter getting funky on a Friday night. After Daddy loses and is humiliated, he hires a mercenary to kill off boyfriend (as you do).
Enter Pico, the primary antagonist of week 3. He’s been hired to avenge Daddy and he doesn’t know at first who he has been sent to kill. When Pico shows up, he realizes that he used to know “Bf”. Maybe even they have an “intimate backstory”.
Mommy Mearest
Yes, Daddy is a bit strange, but he’s an amateur compared to Mommy Mearest. She dukes it out, battle rap style, on the roof of a limo speeding down the highway with an army of backup dancer henchmen in tow. Also, girlfriend’s family is loaded (if you haven’t figured it out yet). Daddy Dearest is a former rockstar and Mommy is a pop star in her own right. Also, the background dancers are grown in bottles. Something worth keeping in the back of your mind, as this will become important later on.
Unused Sprites
Looking at unused sprites hidden in the game, we see that the background dancers/henchmen ripped to pieces with the first in the sequence showing them clearly getting hit in the gut by something. That something is likely a low-hanging light pole.
Filling in “lore holes” with puzzle pieces sourced from various developer comments, after his battle with “mom”, boyfriend’s musical ability seemingly manages to gain him acceptance from the family. We know this based on a bit of lore that dev Phantom Arcade dropped during a live stream.
The boyfriend gets accepted by the family cause week two is supposed to come after the mom and, yeah, well dad and mom might no longer consider boyfriend a target for murder. But they will still mess with him. Oh, yes.
Halloween, Skid, and Pump
For Halloween, Mom and Daddy invite boyfriend over and they play cruel tricks on him. While handing out candy, spooky kids pass by and the two spookiest are Skid and Pump. These two are from the Spooky Month series and originators of the “spooky dance”. Oh, and not everything is at seems. Turns out a monster with a lemon-shaped head is playing tricks. And the Lemon headed demon wants to eat girlfriend (yeah, it gets weird).
Lemon Demon
Lemon Demon officially makes an appearance in week 5 at Christmas in the level with the mall Santa. He comes out of nowhere randomly. It’s a weird transition.
I like this game! thanks for sharing