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...
And the song the Puppet plays is called My Grandfather's Clock. YEAH.
...
He has a point, and I'm surprised that no one has brought up the alarm clock thing before...
I'm actually excited to see his "final" theory.
Okay guys, who has changed their thoughts after this video?
Wow he's a right people do over react
I feel like the people who are complaining about him doing the dream theory didn't watch the entire video...
Okay, i was totally not with the dream theory or this video.
But then he said he also wasn't with it...
And then he said the grandfather clock part...
and fuck me.....i'm officially speechless.
I do hope part 2 is good about the puppet and stuff.
Mat has excellent points covering the theory, but still it's really anticlimactic...
WHELP I'M IN A GAME THEORY NOW
Well, I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed. As I've said before, the dream theory works, but it's a last resort and considering that MatPat has more time and access to brainstorming power than I do, I'll have to submit to this theory. He also brings up a really good point about the grandfather clock at the end of every night. That's a huge detail and it most certainly reinforces the dream theory.
I'm excited for the next episode because I have no idea of how to make sense of the plot. We don't even see the Puppet in FNAF 4, so how could this be related to the Puppet vs Purple Guy?