For 15 years Matthew Patrick, better known as MatPat, has turned toy-starring horror games into a cottage industry. His “Game Theory” videos have been pivotal in turning the Five Nights at Freddy’s series into a worldwide phenomenon. After that game made box office bank, Hollywood is tapping Patrick himself to develop more mascot horrors into feature length hits, starting with 2022’s Amanda the Adventurer.
“The idea is that I’m taking some of my favorite indie games and horror channels from the online interwebz [sic] and I am partnering with Blumhouse to bring them to the big screen,” says Patrick in front of a banner of Raising Cane’s Chicken logos. “We are giving them the spotlight that they deserve, the megaphone they need, because they’re incredible.”
Announced at this week’s New York Comic Con, Patrick has been enlisted by Blumhouse Productions, the prolific horror studio behind everything from The Purge to Jordan Peele’s Get Out, for a “multi-project deal,” reports Variety. The collaboration will be kicking things off with a big screen adaptation of Amanda the Adventurer, DreadXP’s tape-centric puzzle horror about exhuming an increasingly sinister children’s TV program.
Patrick’s decade-plus series of “Game Theory” videos elevated Five Nights at Freddy’s flash in the pan into an unkillable sensation. Divulging, speculating and likely influencing the lore of the games, the story behind evil animatronics has grown so infamously tangled that only the most screen-addled pre-teens can parse it. And they have! Investing their own time and whichever cousins will listen to them at family dinner, Five Nights at Freddy’s didn’t translate into a quality film but an amazing money maker for Blumhouse in 2023. Patrick himself made cameos in both it and its 2025 sequel.
The Game Theory videos have become institutional in indie horror games. Alongside Poppy’s Playtime, Baldi and Bendy, the YouTuber’s popularity molded a certain, bankable style of conspiracy-heavy, spin-off friendly tales of children’s playthings that murder people. Even if they aren’t old enough to know Chuck E. Cheese au naturale, the whole Pizza Time Theater crew are now considerably less popular among their target demographic than their blood-thirsty facsimiles.
Which other games Patrick ends up boosting into the cross-media vortex is yet to be confirmed, but we know one which isn’t in the running. During his Comic Con announcement, someone in the crowd yelled “Slender Man.” “They already tried Slender Man,” responded Patrick. “That ship has sailed my friend.”
