The great thing about doing this sort of thing professionally was that you got to play with shinier buttons. Markiplier reached up to the second level of his desk, keying off the recording equipment for his webcam and mic audio even as he closed the screen recorder app with the other hand.
"Cut, print, that's a wrap." He chuckled at his own joke. It had been a hard project, Freddy 3, making for a long week of sitting in his somewhat cramped studio-office. Horror games were best with headsets, but when you had good lighting on you and acoustic paneling on the walls, the resulting sensory insulation made the games even more visceral. The chuckle, therefore, had something of a nervous quality. Cowthon had outdone himself on this.
It was tempting to fire up something new, some light, bubbly, incredibly saccharine game like Minecraft or I Am Bread or even to fire up an emulator and play something old and classic like Bust a Move. It was tempting, but he'd have to pass. He could no longer stand to be stuck, sitting in this chair, waiting for something bad to happen to him.
Well, not him, but that was part of the magic of FNAF. It was one of those rare, great games where suspension of disbelief was assured. Three had taken it to a whole new level. Special coding to alter the fan speed of the computer to match with the sound of the fans in the security office had provided the sort of remarkably real panic that had both addicted Mark to the game and made the playthroughs he created so popular with his fans.
Some part of him that was still grounded in reality was confident that 3 was going to solidify his position as the preeminent horror gamer. Granted he already made a comfortable living out of this business, but a bigger income meant more booze and pizza.
He frowned. He didn't even like Pizza, but he supposed some part of his mind might well have been still on the setting of the previous games in the series. He shuddered almost fondly, remembering how much simpler things had been in those days.
3 had been a massive departure, and he'd have to smack Cowthon upside the head the next time he saw him. Last time he had someone over who happened to be a game developer...
It had been a shock, certainly, that the game had loaded up and presented him with his very own office, precisely (more or less, with allowances to art style and license in terms of organization) created, and a monitor displaying him all of the rooms of his house, with the usual blind-spots that made the game so exciting in the later hours of each night. Scott had not taken pictures, that Mark knew of. Recreating the house from memory was impressive, and his guesses at rooms he'd never even been in were startlingly accurate as well.
Suddenly, he snapped out of his Reverie. Almost at once, the clock on his desk (a running countdown to the second, used for recording mostly) snapped over to a radically different time. How long had he been staring off into space?
Some part of him realized it was midnight precisely. No matter, he thought. The great thing about being self-employed was that he had no need to adhere to a schedule, and he certainly was in no mood to sleep. Searching for something to occupy his wandering mind, he shot his mouse over to any old place on the desktop, clicking the first shortcut that caught his eye. He'd just play something light like Spore and get on with his day.
Instead, he launched a program he didn't even know he had. For a moment he thought he'd opened a disguised copy of FNAF3 (and made himself a note to commend Scott on the idea), until he realized that the program was coded differently. It was indistinguishable, in Mark's limited experience, from off-the-shelf surveillance recorder software. Except he didn't own any surveillance cameras, and certainly hadn't positioned them through his house as they had been in the game, down to the littlest details of angle, focus, and framing. The only difference was that these video feeds were live, photo-realistic, and showed his actual house without embellishments or easter-eggs.
All at once he broke out in a cold sweat, and found himself rooted to his seat. His upper and logical brain functions tried to find an explanation. Some part of him just wanted to close the problem, chalk the whole thing up to being a bad dream and go to bed. Certainly any thought of playing another game or stitching together an episode or two to render overnight had left his mind... but the deepest levels of his brain, those hard-wired portions meant to keep the Man Ape alive in the prehistoric jungles of darkest Africa 60,000 Years Before Fire made sure the cameras had his all but undivided attention. He knew what was coming.
Attraction worked somewhat differently in this game. The five were roaming the neighborliness - well, the four were. He'd still yet to see Golden Freddy. Anyway, the five were roaming the neighborhood, and every time you checked your camera, a light would come on in that room. Being as they were looking for people to "entertain", the anamatronics would be attracted to the light, whereupon they would seek to force entry. They seemed to be able to break down doors with impunity, and even enter through ground-floor windows when necessary.
What was worse, though, was that if Foxy wasn't monitored for long enough - lord knew how he knew - at regular enough intervals, he'd knock out your power. That was perhaps somewhat less stressful than him simply rushing the office... but it was still miserable. Now you had to sit there, as in the first game, and wait for Freddy to show up, serenade you with a remastered (and truly awful) jingle, and then jumpscare your poor ass back to the menu screen - do not pass go, do not collect your pitifully low wages.
It took conscious exercises of willpower not to check the cameras. Once you had an eye on the animals, you could dissuade them from finding you by closing certain doors - including the office door, which had always been invulnerable. The doors even stayed where you left them without an impact on power, but the sound of them opening or closing would attract attention, forcing you to leave them open for as long as humanly possible - that is, as long as your nerves could stand.
To his great frustration, he found the basement window where you were supposed to check for Foxy was already open. Frantically, he tabbed through the cameras, trying to find where Fox was in the house - the red bastard could still jump you if you weren't good with the doors - but to no avail. He reasoned he was being silly. He was just looking at the security cameras his landlord had obviously installed. He dimly, very dimly remembered making a request for it - with fame and notoriety often came risks, after all.
That sort of quasi-amnesiac nonsense made him shudder, and then he screamed.
All at once, the house went quiet, silent, even. And dark. There were no CPU fans, no dull hum of the recording equipment, no A/C, not even the ever-present hum of a fridge condenser pump. There was only the sound of his breathing, the pulsing of his heartbeat, and there, somewhere at the edge of his hearing...
"Dum de dum dum dum."
Okay, okay. Obviously lack of sleep and truly breathtaking game design were conspiring to create some element of hypopompic fear. As bravely as could be expected under those circumstances, in which every nerve in his body seemed primed to explode into action as needed, he resolved to go downstairs, get the power working again, grab himself a beer, and drink himself into his bed.
Yes, this sounded like a reasonable thing to do. After all, ever since Fire, human survival has depended heavily on the Man Ape's control over light, and it never felt safe without it. After some pawing around for his phone to use as a flashlight, he sturdily resolved to carry out his plan.
The path to the basement was fraught with pareidolia of the worst sort. Every shadow seemed primed to hunt him down, and more than once he sat motionless at a corner, forcing a fresh breath against the instinct to hold his breath. In the end, he made it downstairs without incident, and as he reached for the breaker panel and jerked it open, he berated himself for being such a baby. Nothing to it.
A quick double-flip of the master breaker and the lights snapped on, whereupon his closed the breaker panel, and caught the barest hint of brown in the light diffusely reflecting off of it.
He frowned, trying to think what in the basement rec-room that could be, when a hideous laugh plunged him into a scream that never quite made it out of his lungs, as a padded, reeking glove closed around his mouth, and inhumanly strong arms pulled him back against an equally soft and padded something.
No no no... wake up!
He could see Foxy, and now there was no cartoonish art style to insulate him from the horror, from the rancid decayedness of the suit over that deadly endoskeleton inside, from the putrid hints of sultry organic secrets peeking through the gaps, as he came forward with a Golden Freddy mask in his one good hand, full of cross-bars and servos. The others were there too, shambling toward him with armfuls of the rest of the costume-tomb.
Every neuron screamed for wakefulness they already had.