Today, we end the horror.
Today, we solve FNAF!
*Creepy Version of Game Theory Music*
Hello Internet, welcome to GAME THEORY
Where, after months of intensive therapy
I'm back to finally put the original FNAF titrology to rest
It's done.
No more Halloween updates, no more FNAF 5 rumors and NO MORE FAN
*psycho violin screech*
Suck on that, you multi-bladed propeller of air!
So shortly after my last Freddy theory, I arranged a live-stream with some follow FNAFers to close the book on the series,
and what happened was something that none of us expected.
*weird distorted audio*
(We have internet) We have inter-- We're back
No, not the stream issues
Scott started talking to us! Well, kinda
He kept updating his site, ScottGames.com,
with cryptic messages as to the true meaning of the game
"What is seen in shadows is easily misunderstood
in the mind of a child"
"In the FNAF 4 minigame, why would the
tiny toy Chica be missing her beak?"
and finally, "Four games.
One Story."
It was incredible!
After a year of taking shots in the dark, finally we were,
in a way, hearing back from the man who knew all the answers.
Scott Cawthon, the creator, was reaching out from the shadows
to give us, for pretty much the first time ever, concrete leads
as to where to look. But what did these cryptic clues mean?
In the moment the best I could do was this:
Is it possible that FNAF 2 didn't actually happen?
But in the days that followed, those three clues led theorists on
Reddit, Steam, and YouTube to completely throw out everything that they knew
about the franchise. What if we were looking at the franchise all wrong?
instead of counting animatronic toes, calculating minimum wage rates, and
tracking Purple Guy's work history, maybe we needed to take a step back
What if everything in FNAF was just a dream?
*Screeching Noise*
That's right, a FNAF dream theory. That everything we play through in these games
was created in the mind of the FNAF 4's crying child.
It sounds like a cop-out, right? Like a lazy storytelling cliche.
Maybe, but stay with me. Even if you think you've heard parts of this theory before
you'll want to stick around. I've unearthed the clues that finally put our
year and a half of FNAF speculating to rest
Of the three clues Scott gave us that day, the most damning one was the last one
"Why would tiny toy Chica be missing her beak?" Uh... what?
In the FNAF 4 mini-game, you can talk to a small girl on the playground with
toy versions of Bonnie, Freddy, and Chica. But her beak is missing?
During the stream we were all like "Scott, puh-lease."
But when we looked, sure enough, there it was. A few orange pixels laying on the ground.
What? Seriously? This was the crucial detail all of us had missed? And yet,
for as absurd as it may sound, those five pixels changed everything. Upending a
year worth of theorizing. Because that missing beak directly parallels FNAF 2's
new version of Chica, who loses her beak when she goes on the attack. It was
something we all had written off as a graphical glitch or a design choice, not
as a clue to the meaning of the entire series! And yet here it was, from the
creator's mouth. And that is when it started to click.
FNAF 2's shiny new animatronics. What are they called? Toy animatronics. And
that's not just a cute name the community came up with like "Freddles"
It's right there in the custom night menu. It's canon. That's a strange name for a bunch
of robots, right? Unless it's meant to be taken literally, and then they're all just a bunch of
t-ooooh my god... What if they are toys, and this is all just a dream
scenario inspired by these little guys?
Well, let's keep going with this toy clue. I mean obviously the toy animatronics are shiny,
plastic-looking, fake, just like a small plastic action figure would be.
But it explains a bigger question about FNAF 2, the look and design of Mangle.
I mean, seriously, the story we're told to believe in this game is pretty absurd
That kids just rip it apart and put it back together again?
And so the employees just leave it as a mangled collection of parts for small
children to play with. What parents would ever be comfortable letting little Timmy
touch that thing? Aww, and here is a cute thing for you to play with! Oh my gosh, who could
have seen that coming? But if we assume FNAF 2 is in the mind of a child who
has seen all these toys, Mangle makes a whole lot more sense
It's just a dismantled toy. Think about Sid from Toy Story who fuses various toys
together to create hideous abominations.
This explains Mangle's two head. I don't care how much you redesign Foxy,
NO ONE planned him to have two heads!
In fact, note that Mangle appears in the girls room. An insignificant detail?
I don't think so. The Chica beak shows that this girl's toys fall apart just
like Mangle, the tear-apart, put-back-together toy. And toys explain FNAF 1
too. The crying child of FNAF 4 has four plushies in his room,
the crew from FNAF 1 - plushies, as in soft stuffed animals
What are the original four animatronics made out of? Soft materials: fur and
fabric, not plastic like the toys.
So much so that the one thing that we hear about them throughout the series is
that these old animatronics collect odors, and never get washed.
Just like an overused and overloved stuffed animal. But the parallels don't stop there.
Why is Foxy out of order in FNAF 1? Well, the plushie he's based on is
missing its head. How about Foxy's jump-scare popping in abruptly from behind a wall?
It's awfully similar to the way the brother scares the crying child
throughout FNAF 4, in his Foxy mask,
no less. And how does Golden Freddy fit into this? Well, in the hidden FNAF 4
easter egg, we see on the TV that the show "FredBear and Friends" features the
golden Fred bear alongside the core four of Foxy, Freddie, Bonnie and Chica.
That's your cast from the first game.
The dream of FNAF 1 was inspired by this show and the plushies,
hence it not containing any of the other animatronics. Even the fact that the
child doesn't have a golden Freddy plush and that, instead, he has his imaginary
friend, a psychic friend Fred Bear, who appears and disappears at will
directly references Golden Freddy's ghostly behavior in FNAF 1 & 2.
In fact every game, design detail, and animatronic can be explained under this
theory. The recurring elements of the phone and the, ugh, fan, right there from
some of his favorite toys.
The fact that no one in their right mind would work in a place like this? Dream.
Firing an employee for something like odor?
It's a child's imagination of what employment is like. How about the weird
metaphysical hoops that you have to jump through to access FNAF 3's mini-games?
Well, dreams have weird rules where dialing codes into cinder blocks makes
perfect sense.
FNAF 3's Springtrap is directly inspired by the girl and her golden Bonnie
finger puppet that pinches and traps her finger.
The idea that the animatronics stuff you into suits comes from this girl
spreading the urban legend that if you die they hide your body and never tell.
The naked endoskeletons come from his time trapped in the supply room.
Balloon Boy is the dream version of this kid, excited to go to the birthday party.
They even have a single balloon each. Even the oddballs of Shadow Freddy and
Shadow Bonnie fit under this theory. They're the product of the crying child
being freaked out by the shadows that Golden Freddy and Bonnie cast onto the
wall. And while we're on the subject of shadows, dream theory even rolls up the
Purple Guy.
Let's pull in Scott's second clue. "What is seen in shadows is easily misunderstood
in the mind of a child."
Yes, he could be referencing the shadow animatronics which are literal shadows,
but he's more likely referencing is Purple Guy helping a fellow employee put
on the yellow suit. They're in a dark shadowy room, and what the kid sees, or
what he thinks he sees, is someone getting violently stuffed into a suit
when it's just a mascot putting on its head.
Think about how traumatic it'd be if you were a kid and you were at Disneyland
and then saw Mickey Mouse suddenly take off its head.
It would blow your mind! But we all know that there's no murder happening. It's
just employees going about the daily grind.
In fact, that's why Purple Guy is purple. In the Atari style games,
shadows are represented not with black, but with purple, as indicated by the
shadows cast by the animatronics on stage.
That's why Shadow Freddy, Shadow Bonnie, and even the innocent employee in the
dark back room, the shadowy Purple Guy, are such an unusual color. Still skeptical?
So was I. Sure, it answers a lot and smooths out the timeline, but there was
still one piece of the puzzle that was missing. One thing that was nagging me.
It still felt like a convenient explanation, but not an intentional one.
Not something that Scott had planned for the series.
All I needed was just that one detail that made everything fit together. But
then, while writing this script, it finally dawned on me.
The nail in the coffin, the one piece of evidence that no one can deny and that,
to my knowledge, no one has talked about in the months of theorizing. The detail
that convinced me,
this theory has to be true. Are you ready to have your mind blown?
Listen to the sound that you hear at the end of every night of the first three
games.
*Grandfather Clock Chiming*
*Higher Pitched Grandfather Clock Chiming*
*Same Grandfather Clock Chiming*
A grandfather clock, chiming the same song, every time.
Why would the end of my shift in an office be signaled by a grandfather
clock chime? It wouldn't. Unless I was asleep, dreaming in my house, with a
grandfather clock right outside my room. Just like the layout of the crying
child's house we see in the FNAF 4 mini-games. Six o'clock AM, time to get up.
But now let's look at the FNAF 4. How does each night end there?
*Beeping*
A beeping alarm clock
Why? Because we're no longer in the crying child house. We're in a hospital,
trying to recover from being bitten.
Hence the pills, IV, and flower easter eggs. No hospital has a grandfather clock,
but they're all equipped with a generic digital alarm clock
This, to me, was the missing link. The piece of evidence that took this theory
from convenient explanation for a lot of the games weirdness, to definitive proof
that this is what Scott intended. My heart is racing right now, I'm so excited
about sharing this with you. It feels like finding the Rosetta Stone, the one
detail that unlocks everything else in this huge mystery we've been trying to
solve. But at the same time, it's bittersweet, right?
Remember what I said at the beginning of the episode? (Episode? Episode?) It sounds
like a cop-out right? Like a lazy storytelling cliche
*Yelling*
How many of you agreed with that? If you're honest with yourself,
I bet a lot of you. You'll notice across my videos, I don't cover dream and coma
theories very often for exactly that reason. They're too easy,
too flexible. Because it's all a dream, weird stuff can be written off. Logical
errors overlooked simply because it's not actually real. In the theory world
they're OP. They're hard to argue against and can be molded to fit any
random collection of details. And for a game like FNAF, where us
theorists have spent thousands of hours combing through all the details; making
and remaking timelines; bending over backwards to make every last piece of
information fit together across the four games; a "it was just a dream" reveal
invalidates all of that work.
It says that none of it really
mattered, since none of it really happened. And Scott knows this.
Let's look at a quote from Scott in his update on Steam regarding the Halloween
DLC for FNAF 4. Quote: "The story remains completely hidden.
I guess most people assumed that I filled the game with random easter eggs this
time. I didn't.
What's in the box? It's the pieces put together. But the bigger question is-would
the community accept it that way?
The fact that the pieces have remained elusive this time strikes me as
incredible, and special, a fitting conclusion in some ways, and because of
that, I've decided that maybe some things are best left forgotten, forever."
End quote. To me, the key phrase here is "Would the community accept it that way?" He
knows that a "it's all the dream" explanation would fail to live up to our
astronomical expectations.
It's underwhelming. What about the puppet? What about the oddly specific detail of
the paychecks? How about Scott confirming on Steam that my FNAF 2 theory was almost
a hundred percent correct?
It's this "will the community accept it?" quote that makes me think Scott intended
the dream theory to be official, but also understands that ever revealing it would
be a huge mistake.
Hence him keeping it locked in the box. I mean, you can already see it in the
comment threads discussing earlier versions of the dream theory. People
enraged by the sheer mention of this thing. Heck, you'll probably see it in this
comments section
but it doesn't have to be that way. Sure the nights themselves may be a series of
dreams, but the lore contained within those dreams doesn't have to be
meaningless.
In fact, it's not. Think about it. The urban legends the kids are sharing had
to start somewhere.
*RAWR*
That crying child clearly saw something that made him scared of these
restaurants. And then how did the Atari games fit in?
Are they just dreams within dreams? They're not. In researching this episode,
I not only found the clues that solidify the dream theory, but also the missing
links that we've all been overlooking in putting the FNAF timeline
together.
Scott's final clue about "four games, one story" may be a reference to a crying
child's nightmares and eventual death in the hospital. But it can also be
referencing the story of the games' primary struggle. The Puppet, and the
Purple Guy. And next week we're covering that. On an all-new Game Theory, Saturday
the 19th at 3 o'clock p.m. eastern time,
12 o'clock p.m. pacific time. That's noon for all of you currently trying to
figure out whether that's midnight or noon.
I know, I know, I get it confused all the time too. Why am I telling you the time
it will be published and uploaded? Well, we're covering that story followed up
immediately by a live stream discussion where I, and hopefully a few other
theorists, will be able to answer your questions as we close out the year with
the definitive answers to this incredibly mysterious series. And I want
you guys to be there so you can ask your questions and talk about all this
together with us live. So remember, that's Saturday the 19th at 3 o'clock p.m.
eastern time, noon pacific time, for that episode followed immediately by a live
discussion with you guys.
I cannot wait to share all of this with you guys
and in the meantime, remember: that's just a theory,
a GAME THEORY.
*Fan Jumpscare*
Sweet Dreams...