The concept of animatronic characters in video games became widely popularized by Scott Cawthon's Five Nights at Freddy's series, but these man-made monstrosities existed prior to 2014 in various forms, sometimes as allies and sometimes as enemies, though more often the latter. In fact, animatronics like the common fear of clowns became such a cultural phenomenon that psychologists coined an official term for the phobia: Automatonophobia.