Friday Night Funkin'
Where it came from
A rhythm game made for the Ludum Dare 47 game jam in October 2020 by ninja_muffin99 (programming), PhantomArcade and evilsk8r (art) and kawaisprite (music), released free on Newgrounds and itch.io. The Week 7 update on April 18, 2021 crashed Newgrounds and its Kickstarter raised over $765,000 in two days.
A tiny blue-haired guy in a backwards cap (Boyfriend) wants to date Girlfriend, so he has to beat her relatives and exes in rap battles. You hit arrow keys in time with the song while he goes "beep bop skdoo" and the opponent bobs along menacingly. That's the game. It's DDR crossed with PaRappa, drawn like a 2005 Newgrounds flash cartoon, which it basically is.
The meme part is everything that grew around it. The modding scene went feral: thousands of mods put Boyfriend up against Shaggy, Tricky the clown, Whitty, Garcello, Sonic.exe and basically every cartoon character with a pulse. Kids on TikTok and YouTube turned the sprites into animations, "FNF but every character sings it" covers and endless fan art. People also noticed a Judge Judy defendant looked suspiciously like Week 6's Senpai.
If you were near a school Chromebook in 2021, you heard this game. The full-ass sequel is still in the works and the mod scene never really stopped, though the peak elementary-school mania has calmed down.
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Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
