Back in October of 2014, one fateful decision changed the course of this channel, and my life, forever.
Hey Twitter, time for some scary theories.
Which of these guys would you rather see a Halloween theory on?
Slenderman, or this new game Five Nights at Freddy's?
And the rest is history.
Five Nights at Freddy's became synonymous with the channel,
and ten years later, we still have yet to touch Slender.
But what if things had turned out differently?
What universe lies behind the other choice?
What episode got lost to time?
The freak accident that killed Afton's Son.
I'm back to finally put the original FNAF tetralogy to rest.
Today, we solve FNAF.
Hello, Internet.
Welcome to Game Theory, the smartest show in gaming.
And welcome to our very spooktacular Halloween episode.
Earlier this month, I put out a tweet asking you what franchise you wanted to see covered.
The results were close.
So close.
But in the end, Slenderman won out by a single vote.
Good thing, too, because I had no idea what I was going to say about that weird, spooky bear game.
Now, it's been about two years since our Slim Shady man first hit the scene,
and in that time, we've been distracted with plenty of Harlem Shaking and Flappy Birding.
So in case you've forgotten, let me catch you up.
Slenderman is basically the grandpappy of horror here on the interwebs.
Even though the game released in 2012, the character actually dates all the way back to June of 2009,
when Eric Knudsen, under the screen name Victor Surge,
posted these two pics of a deadly figure photobombing some kids as part of a spooky picture contest.
In the caption, Eric called the figure The Slender Man, and the internet was hooked.
The character bounced around creepypasta forums and spawned internet videos,
but really, the turning point came when the fangame Slender: The Eight Pages was released.
To say that this game was a viral success would be an understatement.
If you can not run for more than...
Whoa.
WHOA!
Slender Man, come rescue us!
We're trapped!
Whoa!
I don't know where it was.
Get out of the way, tree.
Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Literally overnight, the whole Let's Play culture of screaming way too loudly at mildly scary things was born.
I mean, that last guy, Markipillar, he only had about 2,000 subscribers when Slender came out.
Now he's nearing 4 million.
Keep up the good work there, Mark.
I could see you going places one day.
But what could I, MatPat, a gamer without a Let's Play channel, do about this sort of franchise?
Well, while everyone else was busy screaming their heads off at footage of slow walking through repetitive, low-poly trees,
no one stopped to ask the real question here.
The hard-hitting question that everyone surely needs the answer to:
Is Slenderman actually a Slender Man?
Sure, he's tall and thin, but does Slenderman's weight to height ratio,
does his body mass index actually classify him as Slender?
Or is he just lying to us?
Is that a dumb question?
Yeah.
Does it fit with all the other stupid stuff that we talk about on this show?
Absolutely.
Is this yet another excuse for me to avoid doing part two of our Watch_Dog series?
You betcha.
So prepare to whip out your rulers,
your pixel rulers, that is,
as we weigh our options and answer the most massive question in the Slenderverse
that no one but me would ever want to solve.
Just how slender is Slenderman?
So in order to figure out Slenderman's figure,
we should probably get ourselves a baseline of what makes something slender in the first place.
Which means that it's time to turn to my dear friend Webster.
Miriam Webster, that is.
Pulling up the dictionary and looking at the definition of slender, though,
doesn't give us a lot to work with.
Quote,
I mean, makes sense,
but it's not really giving us a clear bar of what we would and wouldn't classify as slender.
The closest one of the batch is probably this.
Quote again,
Better, but also pretty obvious.
For our theory today, we need something that's a bit more clear-cut.
Something more specific.
We need a place where they ruthlessly tear body types apart by the fractions of an inch.
We need fashion.
Which means I did the unthinkable.
I stepped into the world of the beauty gurus.
That's right, Weboverse.
I pulled my best Bethany Moda,
did myself a smokey eye,
and dug around through runway walks and Get Ready With Me tutorials
to determine the definitive definition of slender.
Miss Glamorazzi, eat your heart out.
And let me tell you what I found was shocking.
Shockingly incomplete, that is.
Honestly, the world of style was just largely devoid of scientific rigor and quality testing.
Oh sure, some definitions I saw equated a slender body shape to being rectangular.
Another source I found talked about how the arms and legs are typically longer,
which yeah, both of those do fit for Slenderman,
but again, it wasn't giving me the mathematical precision that I was looking for.
Someone should probably fix that one of these days.
Anyway, with the wordsmiths and fashionistas letting me down,
there was one last place to go.
One resource I could turn to.
One brother from another mother that was never gonna give me up
and never gonna let me down.
I turned to science.
When it comes to the tools that we have to measure slenderness,
nothing is quite as ubiquitous as Body Mass Index, or BMI.
BMI is a formula that we use to estimate someone's body fat percentage
given their height and weight.
But MatPat, I hear you bold, beautiful commenters saying,
Body Mass Index can't distinguish between weight from muscle mass and weight from body fat.
And well yeah, you're certainly right.
Just hold on to your pewdie-pants there friendos.
Just look at our subject for today.
I don't think either one of those are gonna be a problem.
There is nothing on those bones.
Which means it's time to guesstimate his height.
A quick Google search for how tall is Slenderman reveals that there's no consistent answer,
but since most of us heard about Slenderman from the game,
and this is Game Theory after all,
it's not a bad place to start looking.
In Slender: The Eight Pages, there are several objects that we could theoretically use
as a potential measuring stick for Slenderman,
and most of them suck.
Between the cars, the buildings, and the trees,
none of them have a definitive standardized size.
Most of the things in the game are just too generic,
and could therefore be just about any size.
But there is one object that I think we could translate one-to-one into the real world,
and that is this right here.
The brick wall.
You now have my permission to ooh and ah.
Ooh!
Ah!
Thanks for that. You now have my permission to subscribe,
because this is YouTube in 2014,
and subscribership is and will always be
a very relevant, topical metric for getting my videos seen by you,
and not a system slowly eroded away by evolving algorithms and short-form content.
Now, turn away from that subscribe button and back to me.
Now turn to the brick wall.
Now, back to me.
Brick wall.
Subscribe button, me, wall, great.
Tucked away in the corner of the Slendermap,
this generic, forgettable wall may actually be the key to figuring out Slenderman's true height,
because, while brick walls can just be about any size,
the bricks they're made of are not.
They're standardized.
Or, at least they're standardized by country.
In the US, the origins of the Slenderman,
a standard brick is 2.25 inches tall,
and the mortar joints between them are usually around 3 eighths of an inch thick.
After analyzing the wall, I found it to be 41 and a half bricks tall,
with 41 mortar joints in between.
When put all together, that means that the wall is 108.75 inches tall,
or just a shade over 9 feet.
So that's the wall, but then, what about Slendy?
Well, here's where I was in for a surprise.
You see, when I lured Slenderman over to the wall to see how he stacked up,
let's just say that he came up a bit short.
Physically short.
Slenderman wasn't towering over the wall, he was barely half its height.
I counted the bricks and ran the calculations,
only to find that Slenderman topped out at the crushingly average height of 5 foot 9 inches,
thereby making him 1 inch shorter than me.
It would seem like the stories of the towering, ominous Slenderman have been a bit overhyped.
In reality, Slenderman is just a short king.
That said, I did want to double check my work.
After all, when he gets close to us in the game, we have to look up to match his...
Uh, can you call it an eyeline if he has no eyes?
Something just wasn't adding up here.
So to confirm my results, I went back to Slenderman.
The origins.
All the way back to those original creepypasta photos.
This pic shows our pal Slenderman enjoying a nice day out at the playground.
But not just any playground.
This picture was supposedly taken in Sterling City, California,
which tells us that this is America.
Judging by the rest of the kids that we see in the picture,
the girl in the background must be about 5 to 6 years old.
In the US, the average 5 to 6 year old girl is somewhere between 109 and 121 and a half centimeters tall,
or about 3 feet 6 inches to 4 feet.
Whipping out our trusty pixel ruler, Slenderman is exactly twice as tall as that little girl.
Meaning that his height should be canonically somewhere between 7 and 8 feet tall.
Significantly higher than that brick calculation gave us,
and far more in line with the way that he tends to be portrayed across media.
And since this 8 foot number comes to us from the very first piece of Slender media ever released,
I'm gonna say that Slenderman is rockin' the higher numbers here.
Clearly he's taller than your average human, but obviously nowhere close to the 10 foot tall Wario.
So, with the height of Slenderman now settled between 7 and 8 feet, next comes his weight.
Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of great sources out there to weigh up.
Can't exactly figure out someone's weight just from a photo after all,
so we're gonna have to expand deeper into the Slenderverse to get ourselves our answer.
Back in the earliest days of Slenderman, a pair of creators started a found footage series here on YouTube called MarbleHornets.
Many of the powers and abilities that we now associate with Slenderman,
like teleportation and causing hallucinations,
were brought into the Slender canon by this video project.
However, the thing that this series didn't bother to make canon was his weight.
The creators are famously tight-lipped about what they did to build their Slenderman stand-in.
There isn't even a listed actor on IMDB that we could use as a starting point.
I even analyzed all of Slenderman's appearances in the series frame by frame
to see if one, I would enjoy it, which I very much did,
and two, to see if I could find some hidden detail that would reveal his weight.
But alas, another brick wall.
And as we just learned during the height discussion, brick walls are not useful during this theory.
Go figure. It's almost like these indie games don't bother to think about what theorists like me might need.
Who knows, maybe one day game designers will actually bother to care about their own lore.
That said, I wasn't done.
In my research, I stumbled across this.
A mathematical formula helping doctors estimate the weight of a patient given only their height.
For all those times that you can't get them on a scale.
And considering that we only have Slenderman's height, and weighing him sure does seem impossible,
this might just be the key that unlocks this mystery.
Their formula is weight in kilograms equals n minus 1 times 100,
where n is the height of the patient in meters.
Plugging in the height of Slenderman, we get that Slenderman weighs 143 kilograms,
or a whopping 317 pounds.
Tall, dark, and handsome? More like tall, dark, and dense.
So, there you have it.
That's our solution.
Is what I'd be saying if there wasn't a teeny tiny issue with this answer.
While I'm sure this formula is a great tool for hospitals and emergency situations,
the authors of the paper admit that this formula tends to overestimate the weight of patients the taller they get.
Considering Slenderman is taller than anyone in the study by quite a large margin,
this is going to cast some serious doubt on the accuracy of our number.
I did consider using the weight of the world's tallest man in recorded history, Robert Wadlow,
to try and counteract this.
Wadlow, born in 1918, was the tallest man who ever lived.
Standing at a gargantuan 8 feet 11 inches, or 2.72 meters,
and weighing in at 439 pounds, or 199 kilos.
This guy was so tall that he makes our estimates for Slenderman seem puny.
But, using a nice little ratio, we can use Wadlow to scale Slenderman.
Since Wadlow is 8 foot 11, 439 pounds,
and Slenderman is 8 feet with an unknown weight,
we can set up this nice little proportion here.
Solving for x, we get Slenderman's weight,
which ends up being 392 pounds, or about 177 kilograms.
But once again, this doesn't really account for our full picture.
Slenderman's limbs are strangely lanky,
and while it may not make a huge difference,
it would ultimately make some difference in our calculation.
The problem is, I don't have any other options.
I'm out of ideas, out of sources, and out of formulas.
I guess I just have to throw in the towel, raise my white flag, and say,
Slenderman, you've bested me.
There is no way that I can calculate your weight.
In 2014, but then again, this is 2023.
The 2023 MatPat can do a lot that MatPat in 2014 couldn't.
In recent years, the team and I have learned how to rip the 3D models directly out of games,
which means that we can now use a 3D modeling program like Blender
to figure out certain measurements.
Specifically, Slenderman's volume.
This may not initially seem like the answer that we're looking for,
but volume is only a few steps removed from that all-important weight
that we're getting stuck on.
You see, mass is just volume multiplied by density.
And fun fact, regardless of their height or weight,
people tend to have similar densities.
Around 985 kilograms per cubic meter.
So by turning Slenderman into Blenderman,
and then scaling into that 8-foot estimate that we got from earlier,
I found that Slenderman's volume is .1776 cubic meters.
Now we just plug in those numbers into our equation from earlier to get a weight of...
175 kilograms, or 386 pounds.
Now I can say, boom, we nailed it.
We finally have as close as we can possibly get to Slenderman's official weight,
which means it's time to plug these values into a basic body mass index calculator,
which is gonna tell us that Slenderman's BMI is...
Drumroll, please!
29.4.
Which, honestly, probably doesn't mean anything to you.
But if you take that number and apply it to a BMI chart,
it tells us that Slenderman is actually overweight.
You heard that right, friends.
I double and triple checked my math here,
and it turns out that Slenderman is overweight by about 61 pounds.
In fact, at his current weight and height,
he's only about 5 pounds away from being classified as outright obese.
In short, Slenderman has been lying to us the whole time.
14 years after the Slenderman myth was born,
we've not only proven his height and weight,
we have fully debunked his name.
Slenderman is, in fact, not a Slender man at all.
To truly gain that title at his current height,
he'd need to lose about 60 pounds.
Honestly, it's a conclusion that would have made 2014 MatPat proud.
Heck, it's a conclusion that makes me proud today.
But wait, who then would qualify as video gaming's new Slenderman?
With the title role now vacant,
who are we gonna get to wander around the woods for Smosh Games to scream at?
Well, the answer is downright shocking.
Link.
In Tears of the Kingdom,
you can actually lift and fuse objects together,
and people have been going wild with these things.
Building combat planes, cannons,
someone even built a pod racer.
But the best invention of all was done by Reddit user
RecommendationOK6842,
who made a working set of scales.
I know, theorists really do be the most wild.
What's even wilder though,
is when you put Link on those scales,
he weighs exactly the same as 10 apples.
Which is an improvement from Breath of the Wild,
where in-game scales made him weigh about 8 and a half apples.
Clearly, unlike Slenderman,
Link is trying to chase after them gains.
Your typical apple weighs around 6 ounces,
so 10 apples is gonna mean that Link weighs about 3 and 3 quarter pounds.
While Link doesn't have himself a canonical height,
YouTuber The Bread Pirate figured out that his in-game height is about 5 foot 2,
which makes Link's BMI the absolutely minuscule .7.
That BMI right there is 1 36th that of our Slenderman.
Even if these apples were the heaviest apples ever to be recorded,
which according to the record books,
weighed in at about 4 pounds,
then his BMI would still be at 7.3,
falling well short of the 18 and a half
that you need to fall into the normal weight range.
So, there you have it, friendos.
Game Theory's own What If episode about Slenderman.
Slenderman isn't actually Slender,
and Link is the true successor to the crown.
That said, I think it's safe to say that you made the right choice going with FNAF.
Ain't no way I'd gotten this many theories out of the Slender franchise.
For as difficult as it may be to believe,
I think for once, we may actually exist in the better of the two timelines.
But, hey!
Speaking of all our favorite furry friends,
I need to tell you all about our latest line of FNAF merch,
which is available right now today.
No, the irony of selling FNAF merch on the same day as a Slenderman video is not lost on me.
But seriously, who else is gonna be offering you a Monty Gator jacket
with high-quality green vegan leather in an alligator print,
complete with yellow lining to match his stomach?
It's even got itself some sharp studs to complete that glam rockstar look.
Even if you don't like Monty, you gotta admit,
this jacket drips style.
Or if you're looking for something that's a bit more cheerful,
there's always the Chica-inspired cheerleader set.
You've got yourself the super comfy and cute high-neck crop top
that's all covered in confetti that just makes it pop.
Maybe Slenderman should try some of this.
It'd make his pasty complexion feel a bit more inviting.
And no cheer outfit would be complete without a bright pink skirt.
Oh boy, this isn't just any skirt, my friends.
This skirt is also shorts.
That's right, we got a pair of safety shorts built right into the skirt.
That way you could twirl, high-kick, and set your boyfriend's house on fire
without fear of revealing too much of your, um, personal lore.
Plus it goes perfectly with our FNAF high Chica Varsity jacket.
Dear Diary, I love this jacket so much, I'd be willing to kill for it.
Best of all, it's unisex,
so anyone can enjoy sitting under their favorite tree
and telling stories about their next crush or their next victim.
We've also got ourselves a bunch of 80s-tastic tees,
a Freddy, Purple Guy, and of course,
MUUUUUSIC MAN!
And all of this is without even mentioning the fanny pack,
the pizzeria outfit,
the Springtrap hoodie with Purple Guy liner.
So if you want to get your hands on any of these items,
or just check out the other ones in the collection
that I didn't have time to mention here,
head on down to the description and click the link
to go to theorywear.com
or click the merch links that you see on screen right now
to get your hands on the awesome merch
just in time for the movie.
And the new game that's coming out in December.
You'll need to be fast though, because it's been out for a week
and things are going fast.
So make sure that you're grabbing it while you can.
And as always my friends, remember,
no matter what year it is,
it's always just a theory.
A GAME THEORY!
Thanks for watching!