Today we end the torment.
19 books, 11 games, eight whole years, all leading to this moment.
The ultimate FNAF timeline is finally complete.
The pieces are in place for us.
Now all we have to do is put this story of tragedy, jealousy and loss back together.
Hello Internet!
Welcome to Game Theory, the show that feels like a kid revealing the class project that
he's been working on all year.
Except here.
It's the class project that I've been working on for the past decade of my life.
This one is big, my friends, and I got to admit, I’m kind of nervous.
Haven’t attempted a timeline video on this franchise since 2018.
Back in the days when Mike was the crying child Afton coming back was actually a surprise
and Fazgoo wasn't a phrase I'd ever thought I'd have to utter.
But since the last time I did something like this, we've had three more massive games,
the death and revival of the FNAF movie and more robot kids than you can shake a staff
bot at.
It is exhausting trying to keep track of this whole franchise, which honestly is why I'm
here today.
The lore at this point is complicated.
It is full of speculation and theory, so to hopefully make it a little easier for everyone
and to give us all a baseline to talk about this franchise moving forward into the future.
It's time to reveal my current workings FNAF timeline.
But just before I do, I just want to explain a couple of things.
First, this timeline is massive.
Seriously, it is huge.
This thing towers over any video project we have ever done on the channel.
But when you look at the totality of this franchise, the story of FNAF really boils
down to the story of one man, William Afton, his successes, his failures, his rise to becoming
co-owner of one of the most successful restaurant franchises in the world, and his eventual
fall to the monsters he helped to create, only to then be reborn in a new digital form
later.
That's why I've decided to split this timeline into three main chunks: the foundation of
Freddy's, how the business started and how it came into being, The Afton era, William's
decades long murder spree and post purple guy, basically modern FNAF.
Everything that happens after the pizza simulator fire.
And because there are lots of new big revelations in this thing that seemingly come out of nowhere
as well as just points I want to talk about further, I decided to dedicate one episode
to each chunk.
I originally wanted it to be one seamless, continuous video, but it just felt incomplete
without some sort of explanation at the end of each one.
Once this whole thing's done, I promise I'm going to merge all the narrative bits into
one massive video so you can just skip my explanations.
But for now, this just felt like the best, most satisfying, most complete way to do this.
That being said, this is still about the story, the broad strokes of the franchise.
So in order to make sure that you guys know that I'm not just pulling answers out of thin
air, not only am I discussing some of the more controversial bits at the end of each
chunk, we're also putting in a handy little graphic in the bottom left hand corner of
the screen, which will show thumbnails, video titles, books and any other citations that
we need throughout the video.
So if you wish to understand that specific statement in more detail, you know exactly
where we've taken it from.
That way you can look into those details for yourself.
So sit back, grab some popcorn or your pitchforks if you're the type to get upset when I say
something controversial and make sure that you subscribe, since this is going to be a
video that you're going to want to come back to a few times in order to fully dissect.
Without any more waiting, I present to you the story of a loving, obsessive father who
slowly descended into madness and along the way discovered the secret to eternal life.
Our story begins not in the 1980s or even in the 1970s, but all the way back in the
1930s.
It was the throes of the Great Depression, and people were in desperate need of cheap
entertainment, especially in Utah.
One of the states hit hardest, fourth highest unemployment in the nation and full of transient;
people looking for work in Salt Lake, finding none and ultimately moving on to find their
fortunes out in California.
People were tired and they were hungry.
But as they traveled, there was one thing that could lift their spirits.
A simple roadside attraction called Fredbear’s singin’ show.
The ads were plastered all over town featuring an animated bear drawn in the popular pie
eyed, cartoon style for characters at the time.
He resembled cartoons like Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Betty Boop.
It immediately said that this Fredbear’s was a place where you could bring the family
and the price honestly couldn't be beat.
For $0.50 you could get food and entertainment as you watched the local trained real life
dancing bear perform on stage.
Normally you only got to see dancing bears at large traveling circuses like Barnum and
Bailey, where the tickets would go for about a dollar.
And that's a dollar without food.
But this was a smaller show like the type from the Von Brothers or the Robbins Brothers,
where tickets would sell for just a mere $0.50.
Watching that bear do tricks on stage brought a glimmer of joy at a time when so much was
wrong with the world.
The simple show would go on for years, bringing happiness to hundreds of travelers, passing
through, looking for a quick meal.
But it left a permanent impression on one little boy, capturing his imagination in a
way that nothing else had.
One little boy named Billy, that was his nickname at least.
But his parents like to call him William.
William Afton.
The bear could dance.
It could sing.
For decades, William dreamed of recreating that moment of bringing a musical bear to
life.
But how?
William was smart, without a doubt.
And he had a keen mind for business, but wasn't the most creative.
How do you make a singing dancing bear come to life?
The best he could do was using rudimentary costumes.
William was inspired by the work of Walt Disney, who throughout the fifties and sixties was
pioneering the use of mascot suits throughout his theme park, the big innovation: suits
with five fingers.
This allowed the performers wearing the suits to use their natural arms and hands to interact
with the guests as opposed to the older models where the arms would just hang limply by their
sides.
Finally, with a simple mascot suit, he would be able to realize his childhood dream.
He would be able to bring Fredbear to life.
To appeal to the kids (and for copyright reasons) he changed Fredbear from a realistic brown
animal to a cartoonish yellow bear with a purple hat and bow tie.
But feeling like one character wasn't enough, he added another friend: a yellow rabbit with
a purple vest and matching tie named Bonnie the Bunny.
While Fredbear was certainly his first love.
Bonnie was extra special because that was his.
It was an original character that he had created from scratch.
And I do mean scratch.
William's hand-sewn costumes were rough with seams and stitches visibly showing, but it
was the best that he could do.
And you know what?
It was just enough.
Bonnie and Fred Bear would perform on stage to small but enthusiastic crowds.
Finally, he was able to deliver fantasy and fun to all the kids, delighting and inspiring
them in the exact way that he had been delighted and inspired so many years ago.
And things could have ended there.
That could have been the end to his story.
It could have been perfect.
Had it not been for one thing, other people saw the success of his idea and they wanted
in.
Enter Chica's Party World, a rival restaurant starring performing animal characters.
His idea, except they did it better.
William may have been the first, but obviously he wasn't the best.
It hurt the prideful William Afton to admit it, but this restaurant was able to do the
thing that he always wanted to do; make the animals actually come to life.
All of the performers in this restaurant were robots, simple metal skeletons that were powered
by battery packs.
But all of them able to freely turn and talk and dance on their own, no human required.
It was like magic.
Magic that came from the mind of a brilliant creator named Henry Emily.
This Henry, in some small way, had been able to harness the power of life itself.
Afton admired him.
He was jealous, to be sure, but he also looked upon this man with awe.
Off to one side of Chica’s Party World was a small cabaret stage featuring an elephant
magician on the other hippo known to ramble on and on, that one was more of a joke for
the parents.
But it was the main stage that was for the kids: a rocking band of characters featuring
a yellow chicken thing with a Southern drawl named Chica, backed by a band of other country
themed characters, including a pig with a banjo, an upbeat frog from the local swimming
hole and a brown bear with a heavy southern accent.
Wait, a bear?
But bears were his animals.
Why not a cow or a horse?
Something to fit the country theme a bit better.
Why did he have to be a bear?
And adding insult to injury, they had the nerve to call this thing Nedd Bear a direct
copy of his own Fredbear.
[Nedd Bear] Whoops, That's gonna leave a mark
No, that was not okay.
Aftons jealous admiration turned to hardened bitterness, a bitterness that would only grow
over the next couple of years as families continued to choose Chica's Party World over
Fredbears.
William just couldn't compete with the appeal of the robots.
Eventually, his restaurant would go bankrupt, only to get bailed out by, of course, Henry
Emily.
Another insult, another humiliation that William wouldn't soon forget.
1979: Despite being bitter, Afton couldn't deny that what came next was a period of massive
success and expansion.
With the two franchises now merged into one it was the best of both worlds: Afton ideas
with Henry's robotic expertize.
The two men decided to launch under a new name Fredbear's Family Diner, a pizza chain
that would eventually come to feature a mix of humans and performing suits as well as
on stage animatronics.
They decided to stick with Fredbear as the headliner, considering the yellow bear was
easily identifiable as a brand because he was the original performing animal mascot.
Afton appreciated that.
This new restaurant would also see a mix of characters as the two franchises merged into
one, with Pig Patch and Happy Frog performing right alongside Fredbear and Bonnie.
And as part of this one Big Fredbear family, they even got themselves official merch that
released, ranging from masks to magnets.
That said, not all the characters were winners.
The reception to some characters was just mediocre, so they faded away into the dumpster
storage units and retro budget tech stores of lost nostalgia, waiting for their chance
to step back into the limelight if and when a headliner went out of commission.
Others, though, would fare much better, like a new pirate fox, as well as a blue guitar
playing variant of the yellow Bonnie Bunny.
Ultimately, the franchise would get so big it would spawn its own cartoon show: Fredbear
and Friends.
Business was booming!
In the end, Fredbear and Bonnie’s popularity would be so strong that they would be able
to support the Fredbear’s family diner franchise all on their own, while also spinning off
a new sister location dedicated to their friends.
In 1983, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza launched, giving a dedicated home to all this new supporting
cast of characters: Chica the Chicken, Bonnie the Blue Bunny, Foxy The Pirate, and of course,
the headliner, a brown Freddy Fazbear.
Business was good, and Afton was happy… mostly.
It did bother him that the one original character that he created, the one that he himself played,
Golden Bonnie, got passed over for inclusion in that cartoon show, the only character in
the roster of regulars to get ignored for the show.
But other than that, things were going smoothly.
He had himself a wife, two sons, a daughter.
He had a thriving business.
And best of all, he was able to learn the craft of robotics from the man that he both
loved and hated: Henry.
Together, they were constantly pushing the limits of what these characters could do because
it was quick and easy.
New characters introduced into the roster would be given a simple hand-sewn suit with
five fingers that any performer could wear.
Eventually, Henry would design one of his signature animatronics for that character,
utilizing a divided mouth with either a hinged or sliding jaw design.
This was the first generation of animatronics.
But why stop there?
Afton had big ideas.
What if the animatronics weren't just locked to the stage but could freely roam the restaurant
and interact with the kids?
What if his mascot suits could become animatronics?
What if you could use more than just rigid metallic skeletons?
Why not experiment with tubes and wires that would give the animatronics fluidity and flexibility
while still providing structure?
The possibilities for this technology were endless, Afton fell in love with robotics.
He had started with a dream of bringing one simple singing bear to life.
But with robots, he had stumbled across the tools that gave him the ability to control
life itself.
And thanks to Henry, he was practically speed running his way to an engineering degree.
And while William wouldn't admit it out loud, one other thing that kept pushing him forward
was the desire to beat his former rival, to prove himself smarter and more capable, to
surpass the man who everyone else considered to be a visionary genius.
But pride cometh before the fall and tragedy was about to strike.
Okay.
So that brings us to the end of part one of the story.
That said, at the end of each of these chunks I want to break down some of the logical leaps
that I made since the more narrative format doesn't give me much of a chance to justify
a lot of the big decisions.
And admittedly, there are some large leaps in here.
Let's just start off with Fredbear's Singin’ Show, shall we?
We know based on the retro poster that was hidden in Security Breach, that at least at
one point Fredbear was an actual bear.
And like I called out in that narrative segment, dancing bear shows were a real form of entertainment.
The only problem is that timing wise, none of our main characters would be the people
in charge of that business in the thirties and a series of pizza restaurants in the eighties
without them just being extremely old.
Best case scenario if Afton’s running the singing show when he's 18.
That still puts him at nearly 70 when the first pizzeria opens and his murder spree
begins.
It just doesn't make a lot of logical sense because he doesn't become immortal until his
first death in spring trap.
That's why I suspect that Fredbear's Singin’ Show was either a family business that after
then carried on to a new generation or something that he saw as a kid and just wanted to recreate
when he grew up.
The Fredbear Singin’ Show thing also starts laying the groundwork for some of the core
elements of this story
that Freddy's was a place of fantasy and fun, and that Afton, despite eventually falling
to become the heartless serial killer and mad scientist that we know him as, again,
as someone with good intentions and a love of entertaining kids, he wanted to bring things
to life from the very beginning, a theme that recurs a lot for him throughout the rest of
the franchise.
Next up, let's talk about those mascot costumes.
One thing that I keep going back to is the design of Glitchtrap.
It's a handcrafted suit.
You can see the seams and everything.
It even has five fingers for the performer's hands.
It is very much not a spring trap suit.
This is something much more rudimentary.
It came at a time before animatronics were a part of the story.
That's why I suspect that it was actually the first, predating literally everything.
It's also a suit that is very personal to Afton.
He put his digital consciousness in that form, it's his personal avatar, it's the way that
he sees himself.
There's also a whole separate discussion to be had here about the habits and rituals of
serial killers.
So the fact that he's choosing to lure kids and kill them in this particular suit actually
says a lot about his emotional attachment to it.
So, well, Fredbear seems to have started as someone else's creation.
Golden Bonnie was uniquely William’s, giving him a personal connection, and that's it at
all.
In this whole franchise, only one set of characters have themselves five fingers: the nightmares.
even Golden Freddy; Fredbear was a five fingered wearable suit at one point in the story, as
we see in this shot from the graphic novel.
Before he, like everyone else, was turned into an animatronic.
This seems to imply that all of the main characters had similar wearable mascot outfits, at least
at one point in time, and that whoever is having the FNAF 4 nightmares (if they even
are nightmares, something that will touch on in part two) saw those mascot suits specifically.
Lastly, we have to talk about the elephant in the room, the literal elephant, Orville
Elephants, as well as the rest of the Mediocre Melodies.
For a while now, I have suspected that the Mediocre Melodies played a much more important
role in the story than just being a bunch more animatronics to fill out the roster.
Especially Nedd Bare, which is just so suspiciously close to Fredbear.
And yet there are two key details that were going to have to justify with any Mediocre
Melodies mention.
One, they're very rudimentary with external battery packs, implying that they come very
early in the timeline.
And two, we know that at minimum, Mr. Hippo does eventually become an official member
of the extended Freddyverse.
But if these things are supposed to be cheap generic rip offs, why would you be trying
to rip off yourself?
You wouldn't.
You would be stealing someone else's ideas.
So if Afton created Fredbear, there would have to be some rival franchise.
The only other person who would likely be ripping him off?
Henry.
We've talked extensively about how the Mediocre Melodies are clearly Henry's design esthetic,
so it just has to be him.
I don't think Henry is doing this maliciously.
It doesn't strike me as the type.
He was likely building the robots at the orders of someone else that was running a rival restaurant
franchise.
But that's enough motivation to start Afton down a path of jealous rivalry, but also begrudging
admiration.
As the Freddy Files Ultimate Edition says, it's important to revisit the beginning of
Henry and William's relationship.
So here you go.
I think this is where it begins.
Also, this is future MatPat here coming back to add this one end, it seems like the recently
released character encyclopedia has backed up all of this speculation.
I've had this timeline written for about a month now, but I've also been holding off
a bit to see what wrenches this character encyclopedia might throw into it.
And on this particular point, I've got to say, it seems like we might actually have
nailed it.
They actively call out the suspicious similarities to the main Fredbear crew, quote from on the
pages: “Nedd Bear looks like an imitation altered just enough to avoid copyright issues.”
I don't know about you, but that seems to imply that we were right on the money.
Knowing all of this at one point, the franchises had to have merged.
That's really the only way that you get Mr. Hippo from the rival franchise as part of
the Fazbear crew.
This also mirrors a lot of what happened in the real life history of Chuck E Cheese, with
two rival restaurants, each with their own casts of characters merging to become one
unified brand.
Again we've gone into that in detail with other videos, just wanted to remind you all
of that here.
But why would I call out the rival restaurant as being named Chica's Party World?
A few things, actually.
First, we know for a fact that a location named Chica's Party World exists.
It is mentioned in the source code teasing Sister Location.
So it is out there somewhere and doesn't fit cleanly anywhere.
Second, in the story The Puppet Carver, Chica is very explicitly looped in with the book
versions of Pig Patch and Nedd Bear, implying that she started as a Mediocre Melody.
Thirdly, her design just fits better with a theme of down home country animals with
southern accents playing the banjo and eating with bibs, and with her being the headliner
of the show with her name on the restaurant it would make sense then that when the restaurants
merged, she was the one that was added to the main cast of characters, while all the
other Mediocre has faded away.
It's also why when Freddy's closes after William's killing spree, she's the one to branch back
off into her old franchise and is therefore missing in Sister Location, a detail that's
bothered me for years at this point.
It might also explain why William decided to stuff his first dead kid into Chica.
That one was Henry's creation, not his.
Is all of this a big leap?
Yeah.
Is it connecting a lot of dots that are very spread out across the franchise that I've
been holding on in the back of my mind for years?
Absolutely.
But I think it makes sense.
It also serves as a clean answer to a lot of the random threads that Scott's been leving
dangling for years.
So with all of that in mind, my friends, we can close the book on the foundation of Freddy's.
And don't worry next week I'll be back to give you arguably one of the most confusing
parts of this entire timeline situation.
Part two The Afton era.
I promise it will actually be next week.
This time, no more waiting around.
I am just as eager to get this one out the door as you are to watch it, I promise.
You know what else I promise?
I promise that we'll actually get to talking about the games.
I would have liked to have talked about them in this episode, but there just isn't that
much in the games that helps us depict anything pre-family diner.
Although let's be honest, this franchise has never been just about the games anyway.
Even back in the early days of FNAF we were decoding images and source code that Scott
fed us through the website, the modern day books and the clues that we get from those
things.
Now they're just modern extensions of that.
All of it is crucial to understanding this franchise and its lore, unless, of course,
Steel Wool finally gets around to making that Fredbear's family diner game they want to
make so badly.
But in the meantime, while we wait for that inevitably cryptic game, I hope that this
start to the timeline helps to fill in some of those gaps.
I'm excited to share part two with you next week.
If you haven't subscribed and rang the bell make sure you do it now so you're notified
when that part drops.
I cannot wait to see your thoughts down in the comments below.
And as always, I remind you, it's all just a theory.
A GAME THEORY!
Go easy on me, I tried my best.