Game Theory - FNAF, Thanks For The Memories

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the butterfly effect of Five Nights At Freddy's! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Koen Verhagen, Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Well loyal theorists, this is it. This will be my final Fnaf theory. And this time, I mean it. Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory! The show that, by my count, has had no less than 10 final Fnaf theories. At this point, it's practically become its own meme. But this time, it's no joke. After 66 theories, three live talkbacks and one bang and remix... ...exotic words. Make that two bang and remixes? BAM!

BAD! Today, I end my coverage of Five Nights at Freddy's. After this, there's only one final game theory. And then the curtain closes on my time as host, and Tom will have to step into the spotlight. I'll be right for the challenge there, Tom. Tom? Toy Bonnie, Easter Bonnie, Chocolate Bonnie, melted chocolate Bonnie. Wither Bonnie, Blackheart Bonnie, Rockstar Bonnie, Glam Rock Bonnie, Sunken Toy Bonnie, Bonn, Just Bonn, System Error Bonnie, Nightmare Bonnie!

Well done, but how many toes does he have? Two? No, three. Five? Again. Ah, the first step of FNAF theorizing. Slowly losing your mind. I think he's gonna do just fine. How do you end a series like this?

Should I just do a normal theory about some minute detail? Doesn't really feel final, you know? Plus, I'd probably end up calling someone a robot, and then a bunch of people would get mad at me again. Should I redo the ultimate Fnaf timeline as one final? Here's the lore! Well, that would certainly be big, but it also doesn't feel like that much was changed post-ruin and help wanted to

from what we did at the end of last year. So I didn't really want to be redundant either. You can see the struggle that I was facing, right? This episode, it's a big deal to me. It is literally the end of my legacy with FNAF. And you see, that's when it hit me, legacy. Typically, FNAF theories are born out of the small details. But what if I took a step back and looked at the big picture?

What if instead of counting animatronic toes or dead kids, I took a meta approach and just looked at the entire legacy of FNAF? I'm sure we're all familiar with the butterfly effect, right? The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings could cause the smallest of changes in the air, which could potentially lead to a tornado forming. Well, the term actually comes from the research of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who, in 1963 decided to round some numbers in his data. He condensed one variable from 0.506-127 to just 0.506. And yet that tiny change right there completely threw off his computer's weather models,

transforming sunny skies into violent storms, hence the whole tornado thing. This realization that small changes in data could yield such tremendously different results ultimately threw off science's entire understanding of nature. Before Lorenz, people thought that the universe could ultimately be predicted. Sir Isaac Newton back in 1687 famously believed in the clockwork universe. The idea that the parts of the universe worked like a machine, and that eventually if you understood how the parts worked, you could predict practically anything.

French mathematician Pierre Simone Laplace actually said basically the same thing. Eventually, we would get to a place where nothing would be uncertain. And yet Lorenz showed us that one small change. One minor mistake or estimate or in precise measurement in a complex system could have a domino effect at a massive scale, resulting in changes that you would never see coming. For example, in 1928, Alexander Flecky, discovered that there was mold in his petri dish.

But rather than just thrown it away or cleaning it up, he decided to study it, which then led to the discovery of penicillin, a life-saving antibiotic that could be used to treat meningitis, pneumonia, gonorrhea, syphilis, blood poisoning, and many others. Or if you want another example, you have the explosion of hip-hop music largely owing its origins to a random lightning strike in New York City. In 1977, a bolt of lightning put the city of New York into a 25-hour blackout. So what do you do for all that time that you're stuck in the dark? Ya lutein pillage, baby! New Yorker started to ransack storefronts, including music shops full of instruments and supplies. Suddenly, expensive DJ equipment was in the hands of young aspiring musicians eager to experiment with hip-hop,

which was a new genre of music just hitting the local scene, and thus hip-hop was truly able to thrive. History is full of these sorts of stories, from the foundations of medicine and music, to even stuff as extreme as the origins of both World War I and two. Why do I bring all this serious stuff up in relation to spooky bear game? Because FNAF is one of those rounded variables. One decision by Scott Cawthon reshaped gaming and YouTube and the entire entertainment world as we know it. And that's not an exaggeration for effect. One man's decision to not give up.

To try again in the face of rejection and adversity, literally shifted billions of dollars of the economy and affected hundreds of millions of lives in ways that are incalculable. And that is what I wanted to call attention to in my final FNAF theory. FNAF shows us that by not giving up, one person can have a profound effect on the course of history itself. I feel like the origin story of FNAF's been talked about to death, but just to set the stage here, despite hitting it big with FNAF in 2014, its creator Scott Cawthon had been making games at that point for 20 years since 1994. And yet, even in those earliest days, you can tell that Scott had a fascination with creepy robots, working their designs into projects like the sci-fi Ifermoon and the Religious Pilgrim's Progress.

Even this incredibly rudimentary RPG Legacy of Flan has a final boss that has what looks to be the first appearance of what would eventually evolve into the Mangol. But despite producing a lot of games, none really ever caught the public's eye. And then came Chipper and Sons Lumber Company, where initial reviews, what few there were, were rough. And as the story goes, it was the reaction to James Stephanie Sterling that would change the course of Cawthens' career forever. Thank God for her. It's just all over the f***ing place, and that thing looks like it's gonna kill your children. I imagine the phrase, kill me, is stated over and over again in the world of Chipper and Sons. Oh, they're robot beavers. That's not good.

I think he's the only living thing in this world. This repeated criticism, plus the lack of financial stability, brought Scott down to his lowest. Ready to quit games, he decided to try one final time and lean into the thing that had been leveled at him time and time again, the creepy robotic animations. And thus, Five Nights at Freddy's was born. And that right there, that's gonna act as our nexus point. The one flap of a butterfly wing. The decision to make a final game instead of just giving up.

Now, let's see how it all maps out from there. Let's start with just the obvious downstream effects of this. That one game, over the course of the last decade, has spun off into 12, which honestly, I've never truly sat down and processed. But believe it or not, there are 12 of these things, depending on how you count them. The entire franchise has sold 9.9 million copies on Steam alone, which in total has an estimated revenue of $94 million. That's not even including the console and mobile ports,

or the number of micro-transactions for FNAFAR, which itself had over 40 million downloads. It's also worth pointing out that of the $94 million, $55 million of that was just from Steam sales of security breach, because that one was actually at full price as opposed to all the others, which were either free or a couple of bucks. And while the first four FNAF games were entirely a one-man job, the rest have included voice actors, composers, entirely separate game studios like Steelwall and Illumix. Even to this day, we're seeing this continuous studios like Megacad, who up until now have been focused on releasing games on retro consoles, very niche market,

but that made them perfect to create the retro-style pixelated FNAF game into the pit, releasing later this year. By pairing up with these smaller companies that aren't insanely well-known, Scott's not only been able to make bigger, better games, he's also been able to use his single game's success to put millions of eyeballs and millions of dollars into each of these companies. As a result of their work with Fnaf, Illumic started working with Disney on features found throughout the parks. And if SteelWull ever do release a game outside of FNAF in the future, you can bet that it's going to have itself a fan base attached to it because people now know about them, and they're going to want to see what other work they can do. So that's on the game side, or at least

it's on the official game side, but stopping there would be overlooking the much bigger impact FNAF has had on the games that haven't even been released yet. This one series inspired a whole new generation of game designers, unlike any game that's ever really come before. All of them cut their teeth on a genre

that exploded in the mid-2010s to FNAF fan game. Five Knights at Treasure Island, five nights at Wario's, Pop Goes, The Joy of Creation, those nights at Rachel's, Afton Built, Glitch Detraction, Bloody Knights, Juniors, Dayshift at Freddy's. Thank! Thank you. What is this game?

I could go on and on and on for days. Some of these were just for the memes, others were more serious attempts at making games inspired by FNAF, and many of them were just taking the world that Scott had created and broadening it outward into the game that they wanted to see made. If you go on to Game Jolt, you'll find thousands of fan games, and I do mean thousands. If you search just for FNAF and select games,

you're presented with 36 games per page and 277 pages available. That is 9,9661 games that are tagged using FNAF. And if you're sitting there thinking, Hold on, the math there doesn't add up. You're right, good noticing. That's because I had to remove 11 of Scott's own games that were posted on that list. Though, I'm pretty sure that there are some out there who'd like to pretend that Fnaf World was a fan game. Each and every one of those 10,000 fan games represents a budding game designer, sometimes several. And well, yeah, many, many of those creators are likely never going to pursue game design full time. There are some who will, either independently or as part of a bigger studio, going on to have their shot at creating their own mega franchise.

Their shot to transform the industry. And already you can see that some of these devs are finding success, to the point where many of them have created multiple different games at this point, turning their fan projects into full-on franchises of their own. And all of this is without even mentioning the Fanverse Initiative, where Scott invested money and resources into some of the most promising projects to help those fledgling businesses grow. Now, the success of that one is up for debate for various reasons,

but the point ultimately stands. Five Nights at Freddy's has been directly and indirectly involved in the rise of a new generation of game developers. Developers that just now, 10 years later, were only starting to see get to a point where they're really influencing the wider gaming landscape. Except gaming, it's already seen a massive shift coming off the heels of FNAF. Prior to FNAF's release, if you took a look at any top 10 list about horror games, it would have been filled with games like Outlast, P.T., amnesia. Games that leaned hard into psychological horror and sometimes graphic gore. Fnaf, though, was different.

While other horror games used the classic horror trope of not knowing what the monster looked like, relying on the audience's mind to fill in the blanks of what might be lurking in the the shadows, FNAF put the monsters front and center, allowing them to be the star of the show like we see in movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween. This allowed Fnaf games to be much more thumbnail friendly and easier to sell online compared to the spooky dark hallways or over-complicated monster designs that dominated the horror space in the past. Mixing the more family-friendly scares of Freddy and the gang, and you've got yourself a brand new subgenre of content, mascot horror, as dubbed by YouTuber John Wolf. This genre took old nostalgic locations and filled them with brightly colored killers brought to life through some weird, Experiment or trauma. Bending the Ink Machine, Poppy Playtime, Rainbow Friends, my friendly neighborhood Hello Neighbor, Baldi's basics, Choo Charles, Amanda the Adventure. And of course, Garten a Ban Ban.

And that's not even dipping into the hundreds of lesser-known titles like Joyville. It was Fnaf who paved the way for all of these games. Puppie sold 2 million copies in two years. Bendy has made over $30 million just off of its two major installments. Hello Neighbor is a thing that continues to exist. And while people complain about oversaturation in the market at this point, There is no denying that the formulas worked extremely well for the better part of the last 10 years. But maybe you're sick of games. You want to read a book? Well, I hope you're excited to read the seven Hello Neighbor books, five Bendy books or the Poppy Playtime Employee Handbook that's coming out later this year.

Mascot horror franchises now also line the shelves of your local Barnes & Noble. Why? Because FNAF did it first. Oh sure, Scholastic had done some video game book publishing in the past, mostly guidebooks and activity books, but after the success of the FNAF trilogy, they began to publish other video games like Assassin's Creed Last Descendants, World of Warcraft Traveler. This led them to launch an entirely separate wing to their business, AFK, the video game-specific book department.

It's these guys who are publishing all the books that Tom is now gonna have to read. Now, it's impossible to know for certain that FNAF was the reason for all this, but given it was often shown at the top of articles for this new publishing arm at launch, and has sold 9 million books to date, with an average book price being about 10 bucks,

that is $90 million infused into the historically struggling print publishing business. No wonder the first six rows of their website are dedicated to FNAF. But without AFK, it's easy to imagine a world where these other mascot horror games didn't get that chance. And all those writers who've now been able to make a living off of these franchises wouldn't be recognized like they are. I mean, take for instance Andrea Wagoner, who wrote the vast majority of Fasbear Frights and Tales from the PizzaPlex stories. She's now getting DM'd by fans asking for lore clarifications. Something I'm sure she never anticipated while working on her past writing projects.

Like her dog how-to book, dog parenting, or alternate beauty, the story of a big girl with a big girl with big dreams. Her words, not mine. The same thing is now happening with another struggling industry, movies. After spending eight years in production hell, losing directors, struggling with studios and trying to nail down a script, Blumhouse eventually took the chance on FNAF, making the movie on a $20 million budget

and earning back nearly $300 million. If you don't think Hollywood has taken strong notice of that when they are struggling to get butts in seats, you are wrong. You think it's a coincidence that two months after FNAF's release, Bendy announced his big screen debut? And while a Poppy Playtime movie was already in the works with Studio 71,

I can almost guarantee conversations with studios around it have shifted in the aftermath of FNAF. And who knows what other mascot horror games might end up with movies down the line. And not only is it getting indie game movies greenlit, it's also reshaping film studio priorities. As they continue to fumble around in the dark struggling to find ways to compete with online content, I've literally had conversations with people in the film space about how they're trying to tap into that FNAF audience, that online community. The success of this one film will be shaping the types of movies that get made and how they look moving forward. I guarantee it. But while movie releases mean big bucks for big studios,

the economic ramifications go way beyond just extra cash in the pocket of Jason Blum. The FNAF movie was shot in New Orleans, which, since Hurricane Katrina has been an economically depressed part of the country. Now, I didn't know this at the time, but from speaking to local actors and business owners while I was down there filming last year, I learned that New Orleans actually has a long history in film production. When the state government of Louisiana first introduced tax breaks for film productions back in 2002, over a thousand projects happened down there in the span of seven years.

Those productions created jobs, hired locals, and brought millions of dollars back into the city. However, pre-COVID, those incentives were rolled back, and productions have now started to move to other places like Georgia. That's why so many of the local actors and business owners I spoke with while down there were eager to see the FNAF movie in town. By shooting in New Orleans, a huge chunk of that $20 million budget was going to accommodations. Drivers, caterers, local talent, location rentals, equipment, and other general resources that help local businesses thrive, and maybe start a domino effect to get other movies back in the region. Regardless of all of that, the point is that this one decision, to try one final game, it's grown beyond itself. It's no longer about just making its own franchise full of games.

It's spread to all corners of the media industry, and to so many other IPs and creators, spawning a wave of new franchises and giving life to so many careers that otherwise might not have had a chance. But speaking of careers, there's one final area that's also needed to be addressed, an area that has been so affected by FNAF it's crazy to not talk about. And that, of course, is here on YouTube. FNAF has done a lot of numbers for a lot of industries. But its effect on the YouTube landscape is still visible to this day, and in a much more obvious way. When FNAF first launched, it was just one of many games that YouTubers started playing because spooky games got big views.

This game gave rise to some of the biggest names on the platform. Names that are still going strong today, lets players like Corey X-Kension and Markiplier, who'd been on YouTube for a couple of years, but saw their careers accelerate in parallel alongside the FNAF releases. You also had a massive surge in nerdcore musical artists, like The Living Tombstone, whose FNAF song was at a million views in a couple of weeks, whereas most other songs they would release would have a few hundred thousand thousand views months after release. And Machinima creators started using FNAF models and characters to tell their own unique stories long before the FNAF movie ever hit theaters,

racking up literally billions of views. But what truly set Fnaf apart were obviously the hidden details clue in fans into the bigger story. This, more than anything else, ignited the internet's passion like never before, given rise to the theorist community. People like Dauko, Rezbovsky, 8-bit Ryan, Rye Toast, Ide's Fantasy, Hyperdroid John Fnaf, and of course, us. Going through this game piece by piece in order to find the hidden story within Now, contrary to popular belief, FNAF wasn't the first thing that actually had is creating lore theories.

That was always just part of the channel's DNA. But before Fnaf, we were coming up with lore theories for franchises where the story was basically well known. Whether or not Majora's mask is an allegory for grieving, you get the story of a moon crashing down. Regardless of whether Peaches Rosalina's mom, you get the basic premise of Mario Galaxy. Humans certainly might be Pokemon. That's not really affecting anyone's journey to become a league champ. But Fnaf was different. It showed that games could be built off of withholding the lore and forcing the fans.

forcing the fan base to solve it. By leaving the door open and never confirming anything, Scott allowed YouTubers, Redditors, and just general fans to continually assess and reassess the lore, find new directions, new hot takes. And that means that we're still theorizing about it to this very day. It can be frustrating? Absolutely. Heck, maybe now that I'm retiring from the channel, I can track Scott down and get some answers out of him. But it's also entertaining.

And the success of this theory-based model on YouTube has carried over into the mainstream, where now almost every game and movie release is designed with theory crafting in mind. While it's impossible to calculate the full scope of FNAF on YouTube, I was able to find that there are 106 videos with more than 10 million views each. Together, they total roughly 5.4 billion views on just their very own. And if we assume that they're getting the standard gaming CPM on YouTube, which is about $4.55 that thens a total earning across all of those videos of $24,570,000 in ad revenue. Market player's literally gone on record to say that the house that he lives in is the

house that FNAF paid for. And he's joked on his distractible podcast about how lucrative Fnaf spin for it. Let's go into a fan favorite here. Five nights at Freddy's. Boo. So there's two ways I could look at this, right? I could look at it from the game purely by itself, or I could look at it at the evidence. It is paid out for me specifically. And that's put him in a position to pursue bigger and loftier projects like the With Markiplier series. And now his movie Iron Long. One half of the Living Tombstone, Sam Haft, is now writing songs for internet sensations like Hasbin Hotel. YouTubers like Fanaf and Rye Toast, they've been able to go full time with YouTube, all

thanks to FNAF. And heck, look at us. Because of FNAF, we've thrived. We've been able to grow our team, give jobs to dozens of people, and perhaps best of all, we've carved out our own platform that allows us to turn the spotlight onto a next generation of creatives, to make us taste makers in the space that are able to pay it forward, to make you aware of projects that you should be playing and watching, from cooking companions, to the man in the

suit, to shipwrecked 64, welcome home, Walton Files. The list goes on and on and on. In short, FNAF created an ecosystem where new IPs can thrive, a virtuous cycle that benefited itself to be sure, but also had a halo effect on dozens of other franchises looking to get attention. And all of this is without even mentioning other trickle-down effects. Our large platform allowed us to run charity events like St. Jude, paying that blessing forward to help doctors and hospitals working on treatments for childhood cancer. Where of course, Scott himself was a sizable and direct contributor year after year. There are also dozens of other charity events coming from creators like Docco, Markiplier, Jack Septuichai, Rye Toast, John Fnaff.

Not only have these events been able to raise tens of millions of dollars for various organizations looking to do good work in the world, hopefully those events in turn inspired others. You out in the audience or other creators to adopt a spirit of generosity and giving in their own lives. And again, it all comes down to this one decision. One guy who in the face of adversity and criticism chose not to give up. That is the millions of people and billions of dollars affected by that one spoopy bear game. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for all of that. And while all of this is cool and impressive and inspirational, it's also overwhelming, right?

You look at the impact that one decision like this can have and you feel like you can never live up. I know that's how I feel sometimes. But remember, it's all about small decisions making a domino effect. Just being kind to someone else, saying something nice, holding a door, listening to someone's problems, making them laugh. All of those are seemingly small things that can make a massive difference in the way someone's days going. And that to me has always been the power of these channels. They're a place to learn a little something, a place to brighten your day in some small way,

which then you can pay forward to other people in your life. And that positivity, it spreads. It spreads and creates real massive change. That to me, honestly, is the hardest thing about leaving these channels. But hey, until then, as always, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.