Five Nights at Freddy’s 64

Five Nights at Freddy’s 64 is a homebrew port by Rosie Sapphire of Scott Cawthon’s first FNAF game. It was released in September 2023, and it is a complete rewrite of the original game using the Libdragon N64 library.

Getting the ROM

Since the game includes copyrighted assets from the original FNAF, this isn’t a ROM that can be shared freely on the internet. In order to be able to play Five Nights at Freddy’s, you need to extract the assets from your copy of FNAF and compile it yourself.

Rosie Sapphire provided instruction in the Github readme file, and also made an instructional video explaining how to do it.

I had a bit of trouble following the video, so here are a few things that could help you compile your game if you get stuck:

• CTFAK requires Microsoft ASP.NET Core and Microsoft .NET runtime
• When compiling, the output might be located inside your Libdragon Docker container. To solve this, you need to:
  • Run docker exec -t -i mycontainer /bin/bash to get your terminal inside the container
  • Run cd ./FNaF64 and then ls to look in the directory
  • You should find your fnaf.z64 ROM file in there
  • You can also find the file with Docker Desktop by clicking on your container and going to your container and browsing the files
  • You can now leave the docker container back to your main terminal
  • Run docker cp mycontainer:/FNAF64/fnaf.z64 C:\path\to\target\folder\ to copy the ROM file out of the container into your main computer
• When installing Ubuntu, make sure to use the latest version. The WSL video linked to from the FNAF 64 video shows Ubuntu 18, but that didn’t work until I installed Ubuntu 22.

Other than that, the video tutorial is fairly straightforward and helpful.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 64 style and gameplay

If you’ve played the original FNAF, you already know what to expect. It’s a horror game where you play as a security guard on a nighttime shift at a pizzeria with murderous animatronics. The animatronics roam throughout the restaurant while you sit still in the security booth, and it’s your job to keep them from entering it. If you fail, you’re greeted with a shocking jumpscare.

Each level starts out with a call from Telephone Guy who explains the situation you’re in, gives some tips and sets up what to expect in the coming six hours. You are allowed to look at the security cameras, turn on the hallway lights and close the doors on either side.

Naturally, you’d want to close the doors all the time, but that would use up your available energy so you need to conserve it wisely in order to make it through the night. If you don’t, well, Freddy’s coming for you.

The fun of the game comes from figuring out a way to gain awareness of where each animatronic is. That way you can know when to close the doors to save the most energy before the end of the night.

Review and conclusion

Though I never really got into playing the FNAF games back when they were new, I did follow some let’s plays and the lore of the series back when FNAF 4 came out. I took the release of the Five Nights at Freddy’s 64 as an opportunity to play the game for the first (serious) time. To me, the game itself has been discussed to the point where it has lost all shock factor so there’s not much mystery left to it at this point.

The port itself is really well done. It follows the look and feel of the original game down to the most minute detail. Of course the port has to compromise since it’s a 200MB+ game stuck in a 16MB cartridge, so there is a lot image and audio compression, and the security room has some pretty obvious artefacts when panning from side to side. Though it’s not game-breaking in the sense that it becomes hard to see anything or distinguish sounds.

What I find the most impressive is that Rosie managed to completely rewrite the whole game and that this isn’t just the original game passed through an emulator like some of the other ports I’ve looked at. Not that it would be possible anyway given that FNAF was made for hardware 20 years newer than the N64.

Overall, FNAF 64 a very well-made port that faithfully replicates the look and feel of the original PC game.

Update 15/Nov/2023: The glitch has been patched and is now working great 🙂