Over the past 48 hours, several outlets have reported on a “viral” game titled Five Nights at Epstein’s, which is, according to Bloomberg, “sweeping through classrooms across the country.” They’re not the only ones to jump on the craze, however, as the likes of Newsweek, The International Business Times UK, and even Polymarket have also claimed the game is a “viral phenomenon” that every child in the United States is currently playing at school.
Five Nights at Epstein’s originated as a free-to-play browser game on itch.io, developed by a user known as EvanProductions. It is exactly what it sounds like: a recreation of the first Five Nights at Freddy’s game, but with Freddy Fazbear, Chica, and Foxy swapped out with Jeffrey Epstein, Stephen Hawking, and President Donald Trump. It’s in poor taste, and I certainly wouldn’t want my non-existent kid playing it.
Let’s take a look at the evidence. Bloomberg’s report points to three primary sources, the first of which consists of two separate articles, one from WRAL News and the other from ABC4 News. WRAL News’ report, dated March 3, features one anonymous tip and a quote from a concerned parent in Wake County, North Carolina, but states that “reporting on the topic is scarce, both among local and national outlets.” WRAL News also cites a post on the r/teachers subreddit, dated February 28, which is the most recent mention of the game I can find on the subreddit.
ABC4’s report stems from a Facebook comment posted to the Kearns, Utah page on March 18, which prompted an official comment from Granite School District’s Associate Director, Luke Allen. According to Allen, the Granite District received only one “concern” about the game in February, and cites the Facebook post as the “only one additional concern” they’ve been made aware of since.
Bloomberg’s second source is that videos about Five Nights at Epstein’s “on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube have garnered millions of views.” A simple browse on YouTube confirms that the highest-viewed Five Nights at Epstein’s videos actually went up in January, with one going up on February 1st. Videos related to the game on TikTok are borderline impossible to find, as the platform has seemingly done a pretty good job of deleting them. However, Know Your Meme confirms that the highest-viewed Five Nights at Epstein’s videos on TikTok went up on February 3 and February 7, with only one seeming to garner over a million views.
And finally, Bloomberg’s last source is that a copycat version of the original Five Nights at Epstein’s on itch.io “drew nearly 200,000 visits in February, according to estimates from digital market intelligence company Similarweb.” For context, the original version, EvanProductions’ Five Nights at Epstein’s, disappeared from itch.io at some point between February 21 and February 24, based on archival snapshots.
The version Bloomberg is referring to is a separate website entirely, unaffiliated with the original version by EvanProductions. I checked Similarweb’s estimation of its website traffic in February, and it concludes that the copycat site received 190,825 visits in February. However, it’s important to note that Similarweb estimates that roughly 54 percent of this traffic came from the United States, which means that only 103,045 people from the US visited it (VPNs notwithstanding). That’s only 3,680 unique page views from the United States a day. Plus, there’s no way of verifying how many of those 103,045 visitors in February are under the age of 18. Also, multiple people have reported that Similarwebs has a habit of exaggerating page views by up to three times their amount, so really we could actually be looking at anywhere as low as 1,200 unique page views per day from the United States.
I reached out to itch.io’s founder and owner, Leaf Corcoran, to get a genuine estimate of the original Five Nights at Epstein’s page views. Corcoran stated that the game was viewed “in the order of hundreds of thousands when it was active for a month, but then the developer took it down themselves around late February.” While he stated that he preferred “not to share direct developer account statistics” when I asked about the total number of Five Nights at Epstein’s downloads, Corcoran did tell me that the original game was not “one of [itch.io’s] top viral games,” and that none of the copycat versions of the original “have reached an engagement level near the original page.”
So, the copycats are pulling in far fewer views than the original game, the majority of the viral videos popped up in late January/early February, and the rest of the reports about Five Nights at Epstein’s currently stem from moms on Facebook and articles published within the last 48 hours. With all that in mind, what can we conclude from this?
I think, personally, it’s pretty straightforward: this was maybe a semi-“viral” hit among some kids over a month ago. Every source and secondhand account is calling back to information discovered as recently as mid-February at the latest. We all know that trends among kids move fast. Remember 6-7? As far as the youngsters are concerned, that was already old news by October 2025– which, coincidentally, was the same time that Pizza Hut made it cringe by selling chicken wings for $0.67 cents each. That didn’t stop Kamala Harris from trying to jump on the trend by renaming her social media account “Headquarters 67” in February 2026, though.
This is the viral meme equivalent of leftovers in the back of the fridge that people forgot about a while ago. Even Google Trends claims Five Nights at Epstein’s hit its peak in February. This entire thing comes across now as a sort of forced Night Trap-esque controversy, with news outlets framing Five Nights at Epstein’s as one of the latest examples of the dangers of young people being online and the need for more internet restrictions to protect against the real culprit: poor parental oversight.
In the course of its reporting, Bloomberg interviewed a man named Merve Lapus, who stated that his 13-year-old daughter and her classmates seemed “disconnected to the reality that there were real victims” in the Epstein scandal, and that they laugh about it in a way that’s “almost dehumanizing to the victims.” Every outlet, every news story I’ve read about this has the same sort of “Oh, why aren’t the kids taking this seriously? Don’t they understand?” rhetoric to it.
No. Of course they don’t understand. You know why? Because if the adults in their lives keep yapping on about how the government isn’t doing anything about it, why would the kids take it seriously? Why are grown adults trying to hold children to a higher standard than those in charge in Congress and the White House? The files are out there, but there haven’t been any arrests.
Instead, everyone on X and Reddit just makes the same kind of jokes that Five Nights at Epstein’s stemmed from in the first place. The content in the game is ultimately a reflection of that, of undisputed horrors left festering in full daylight while the system shrugs and keeps sputtering along unperturbed. Why wouldn’t kids find it funny?
