The premise is simple: Playing a cool kid named Boyfriend, you’re desperately trying to take your Girlfriend on a date. But her demonic parents won’t give their darling to any schmuck, so you must fight them and their henchmen in vicious rap battles to win their approval. It’s played like a rhythm game—think Dance Dance Revolution, Osu, Guitar Hero—where you have to mash buttons in time with notes on screen. Except this game is as simple as can be: You move with just the keyboard, every thrust and hip-pump synced up with bizarro yips and eep-ahs.
Friday Night Funkin’ was created during the October 2020 Ludum Dare gamejam, a competition where developers make games in three days. It was initially released as a demo on Newgrounds, the early-internet everything-forum where a slew of artists originated: the madcap animator MeatCanyon, hyperpop producer six impala. Soulja Boy even made Flash animations back in the day. Months after the FNF demo dropped, the creators launched a Kickstarter for the full game with a goal of $60,000; they smashed it within hours, eventually receiving over $2 million.
While the full game still isn’t out—yes, even after four years—this small demo has become maybe the most influential music game of the 2020s. It’s the most popular game in Newgrounds history, beating fan favorites like Meat Boy and Super Smash Flash to amass over 75 million views. But it’s also spawned a tsunami of scorn from people who think it’s a disgrace to the rhythm genre.
When I first started playing Friday Night Funkin’, I didn’t know anything about this clown fiesta of unsavory insanity. I found myself returning to the game not because of the community, the difficulty, or the story—it was the unhinged music that piqued my curiosity. It’s like hyperpop for Sims, or how a Minecraft Villager would sing if it landed a 360 deal with UMG. Bipuh, awwweh, ee-aa-oo: You could mistake these songs for an AI bot suffering from extreme gastric distress. They run the gamut from hardstyle madness like “M.I.L.F” to the bittersweet drift of “Senpai,” which has enough babble to sync with a climactic movie scene where a Mii proposes to her longtime love.
After years without updates, the developers returned last summer with the Pit Stop update (a couple of new songs and minor tweaks) and they just released Pit Stop 2, which unveiled six new songs for different character modes. Isaac Garcia, also known as Kawai Sprite, composes these ridiculous and riveting soundtracks. He told me that his new song for the character Darnell’s “Erect Mode”—Friday Night Funkin’s codeword for the hardest difficulty setting—might be the craziest tune he’s ever done. It conjures up an alien sternly reprimanding his alien buddy for eating his leftovers, an onslaught of borborygmic jibber-jabber. “What kind of remix was that? It was just noise!” an exasperated voice cuts in halfway.
