The Five Nights at Freddy's series consists of horror-themed video games in which the player is usually a night-time employee at a location connected with Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a fictional children's restaurant that takes inspiration from family pizza chains like Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza Place.[19] The restaurant has life-size animatronic characters resembling anthropomorphic animals that perform on a show stage, usually for children's parties. The animatronics wander the restaurant at night, and the guard is instructed to watch over them. To progress through the games, the player must guard themselves against animatronics with a variety of tools. The original stated explanation for the animatronics' mobility is to prevent their servomotors from locking up due to lack of use, and their homicidal behaviors are caused by their mistaking humans for animatronic endoskeletons, whom they will force inside character suits, killing them in the process. From the third game forward, however, it is retroactively established that the animatronics are actually possessed by spirits of children murdered by restaurant cofounder and overarching franchise antagonist William Afton, who stuffed the bodies inside the animatronics, then accidentally killed himself when he disguised himself in an animatronic suit and activated its spring-locks. This backstory is hinted at through a secret in the first game, where a hidden news article explains that the restaurant's reputation was damaged when blood, mucus, and foul odors began to leak from the animatronics' eyes and mouths.
