Game Theory - Help Me SOLVE The Impossible! (FNAF)

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he presents a code he needs YOUR help solving! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Tyler Mascola, JayskiBean, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Jerika (NekoOnigiri), Koen Verhagen, Lace and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

See you on the flip side. So I will catch you on the flip side. Hopefully. I called it. I totally called it. Eight years ago, I told you that the purple guy was the phone guy, and now here we are. William Afton, our killer is on a phone saying see you on the flip side. Just like phone guy did all those years ago.

Finally, I've been vindicated. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The show where every victory is bittersweet. You see, well, I should be super happy. that I just had one of my oldest Fnaf theories confirmed. Instead, I'm feeling haunted by the unsolved mysteries of the past. Let me explain.

At this point in the series, I feel like we have a really solid understanding of the story. We know the broad strokes, we know the general timeline, and the few big lingering questions that we've struggled with are starting to come into focus. Where's the placement of sister location? All the most recent games and books have hinted at its connection to the Fred Bear era. What's the origins of Faz Bear? Well, the books seem to be given us more and more hints pointing at the early days of William and Henry's working relationship. What was the deal with FNAF4?

Literally, the final tale of the Pizzaplex all but spells it out for us. All of those are probably theories best saved for a later date, but today I wanted to focus on something else. The clues that we've all completely missed. The times when this franchise has explicitly tried to tell us something, and we've utterly failed to pick up on what it's been laying down. And let me be clear, I'm not talking about me over-analyzing some minor detail of the game world. I'm talking about very clear puzzles that were very obviously set up by the game makers for us to solve,

that we've been unable to do any. anything with. And the reason I'm calling it out now is because they're starting to add up. In my estimation, there have been no less than four of these sorts of major puzzle moments. At least three of them are connected, and it's been going on for the better part of six years. So now that we're all done fangirling over Doug's apps, I finally got my appetizes. Thanks, Matt Pat. Before Help wanted two drops and adds a whole new layer of mysteries to solve, I wanted to take a minute to stop and see if now, finally, we were able to solve these mysteries once and for all. The pieces are in place for us.

The question is, are we able to put them together? The first one of these is also the most recent, so it'd come as no surprise to see me bringing it up here. The tally marks codes that we found hidden throughout Fnaf Ruin. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, in the newest game, right before you reach Bonnie Bowl, there's a corridor with a number of real doors, as well as several blocked off AR doors.

If you walk through one of the real-life doors, you'll find a room full of baby plushies. This is already a bit weird because the game makes it a point to call out the fact that baby should not be here. Specifically with the AR Plush Baby toy, where the description reads, quote, What's she doing here? The answer, we suspect, is that the Pizzaplex,

sister location, the Fnaf 6 location, and the Fnaf 4 house are all practically built on top of each other. Or, at the very least, exist as one connected series of buildings. We go into the basement of the Pizzaplex, only to find the Fnaf 6 location. In a secret ending of ruin, we see a version of sister location scooper deactivating the mimic. And in one of the final tales of the Pizzaplex stories, we read about how the Fnaf 4 house is connected to Circus Babies, entertainment, and rentals.

So really, to answer Cassie's question, the baby plushies are here because they all share a connected history. A history that is gradually being excavated layer by layer underneath the pizzaplex. Anyway, in this room, the dolls laugh at you, and then, when you turn around, they disappear. Nothing all that surprising. But what is surprising is what remains in the left-hand corner right where the plushies sat. You'll find a chair, turn to face the corner, and a sequence of tally marks carved into the wall. And these aren't just random markings either. They're specifically in groups of twos, fours, and five.

and they're grouped in such a way to suggest words, or at the very least, separate letters. Now, that alone would be weird, but an even bigger, clearer display of tally marks appears again about an hour later into the game. After completing Bonnie Bowl, you enter Bonnie's green room behind the bowling alley. Not only does this area show us the, um, special relationship that existed between Freddie and Bonnie, if you put on the Vanney mask, on the wall over top of the pin loading staff bot, is another code, much larger and much more organized than the one that we just saw before. And once again, all the tally marks here are specifically grouped into twos, fours, and fives. No ones or threes in sight.

They are obviously meant to be connected. They are obviously trying to tell us something, but we are obviously not getting the message. So what can we do? Well, the first answer is to try a substitution cipher. Tally up the numbers and swap in the appropriate letters. Notice though that the tally marks are weirdly spaced out, which led a bunch of us to believe that we're supposed to be using those spaces to define each letter, adding up the numbers that aren't separated by the space.

So the top line there is going to be four, then a space, then five. 544 which would add up to 13. It's a pretty darn self-explanatory system here. Doing that for the whole thing gives us a code of 4.136194 17-17-4-1610 87-2719, which if you do a standard number to letter conversion gives you this. DMFS DQG yeah. You know what I'm just gonna leave it there. Clearly this isn't working. It's just a bunch of random letters. You'll also notice that there's a 27 in that number mix which should have been our first red flag Considering that, you know, there's only 26 letters in the English alphabet. But Reddit user T-Girl Lunara wasn't deterred. Because the alphabet doesn't have 27 letters, they instead took it a step further and tried the whole thing as a shift cipher.

A shift cipher is similar to a Caesar cipher, but instead of the numbers converting into standard letters, like A1, B, 2, C3, etc, you instead mix up or shift the order in some way. So now, for instance, A is 7, B is 8, C is 9, and so on. Normally in a Caesar cipher, the alphabet then loops back around, so if A was 7, Z, would then equal six, but in a shift cipher, that doesn't happen. The numbers just carry on as is. So in this case, if A equal 7, then Z would equal 32. For this particular instance, T-girl Lunara put A equaling 4, which meant that 27 was now X, and gave us the entire code of Agca pan-damaged XP. Not a lot of

lore significance with that one. But I did want to continue down that path. So we tried hundreds of different shift and Caesar ciphers. He all came out as absolute gibberish. We also tried just unscrambling the words. Maybe there was another arrangement in there that would give us a more cohesive answer, but yet again, more gibberish. Another solution was presented by user SmartFella Fart Smella. Great name there. We also tried adding up the numbers, but this time they didn't do it by adding up the numbers in each group, but instead the numbers in each column. Again, notice the odd spacing of all these tally marks. It can't be a coincidence, right? The first column contains a four and a five, so that would be nine. The second is just the two, next up is five, so on and so forth, down the line. Ending up with this code, 9259, 137, 10, 8, 21, 16, 20, 14, 17, 8, 2544, 17, 8, 2, 544. This felt promising to me, because unlike last time, we only had numbers that fell within the alphabet.

So, converting all of these numbers into letters, we got ourselves the following. I B. Imgajuptchenb. We once again went through with all the classic Caesar ciphers and word unscramblers and all that stuff, but once again, wound up with nothing. Back to the drawing board for the third time. An anonymous poster uploaded this onto Imager, and the same point was later brought to my attention by Reddit user No Rate. Basically what they pointed out was that the tally marks in the corner of Baby's room make a 5 by 5 grid a grid that when rotated or flipped can map perfectly onto the tally code that we see on the wall of Bonnie Bowl.

No rate actually took this information and pointed out the fact that the main grid arrangement seems to line up with something known as a polybius cipher, which uses a 5 by 5 grid of letters to scramble or unscramble codes. Basically a number code like 53 would mean that you go along the top to 5, and then down three, and boom, that right there is the letter for your phrase. And while it certainly seems promising at first, sadly the method also came up short. With only twos, fours, and fives as the tally marks, the grid wasn't really given us any information that we could use to decode anything. We needed an entire alphabet in here, not just a few random tally marks.

The same held true for another famous 5x5 grid cipher, the Playfair cipher, which requires a code word to use. What could that code word be? Who knows? Did it feel like we were actually starting to make some level of progress here? Yes, absolutely. But did any of it yield us any results? No. But here's where things get really interesting. This isn't the first time FNAF has stumped us with tally marks.

Rewind backwards six years, my friends, to the release of the Freddie Fadsbear Security Logbook. Home to my two oldest and greatest nemesies, the foxy grid, and the dabbing chika. For those of you who haven't been a part of the community for that long, let me quickly tell you that this seemingly innocent children's workbook was pivotal for decoding FNAF4. For giving us the name of Cassidy. for frustrating us to no end with seemingly unsolvable number puzzles. The most notorious of them all was the Foxy Grid, a numeric grid with a hidden alphabet written into its squares, a grid that we still haven't figured out the use of to this very day.

You ever read Moby Dick? At least are you familiar with the story about how Captain Ahab's obsessed with killing this giant white whale? This right here, this foxy grid, that is my white whale. This thing haunts my nightmares. This grid keeps me up at night, which honestly are two very contradictory effects of this one grid on my sleep habits, But that is how infuriating this thing is. I am convinced that this grid will eventually give us the name of the crying child.

I just don't know how yet. Anyway, one of the other clues that never really got a proper use out of this thing were a series of tally marks that were found throughout the book. The fact that they're in red pen tells us that they were written by Mike. Other than that, we don't really know anything about what they were trying to say to us. And so they've lingered on in the back of my brain for over half a decade. Why am I bringing them up now? Well, I wondered if there was a possible connection between these two sets of tally marks.

You know, besides them just being tally marks. Guess what I found? Groups of Fours and Fives ONLY. Yet again, we find ourselves with a collection of tallymarks carrying over the same specific sets of numbers. Are they connected? Or is this just a random coincidence? Not really sure. But the fact that tallymarks keep getting brought up and also keep stumping us, that's just a wee bit infuriating.

And yet the games still aren't done with this puzzle. You see, the tallymarks are connected to yet another part of the franchise, security breach. Back during my play-through of the original security breach, this room in the daycare section really caught my attention. I'm noticing that two, four, and five are different, which is weird. As someone who has dealt with a lot of codes and ARGs and things, that feels suspicious. I agree. 2, 4, and 5. Two years before ruin, some element, some essence of this tally code was still kicking around. But now the numbers were being matched with colors. And so Reddit user comfortable map 7594 took those tally marks and used these colors to create a sort of paint by numbers graphic. Which I absolutely adore as a possible solution, though I absolutely hate the fact that it didn't seem to produce anything.

Let me know down in the comments. Do you see anything here? Because to me, all I'm seeing here is me getting depressed. So maybe we just take a break from trying to decode these things and instead take a minute to look at the world around these tallies to get a sense of who might be speaking here. As I mentioned, in the security logbook, we know it's Mike, based on the red pen and the signature at the front of the book. But what about in ruin? Well, in the baby plush room, we have, obviously, enough, baby. Not that shocking. But what's especially important to note here is that they're not all baby. See, half the plushies are normal baby and the other half are scrap baby. What's the big difference? Well, besides the obvious scrap metal plates on their bodies,

there's one thing that alternates depending on the version, something that's been important to baby since the very beginning, her eye color. The regular baby plushies have blue eyes, while Scrap Baby has green eyes, showing the two sides of baby before and after Elizabeth's death and possession. But Reddit user Dylan Hippie Jink took it one step further. They noticed that the eyes of the baby and scrap baby plushies were scratched out, leaving just the blue right eye from baby and the green left eye for Scrap Baby.

That right there? That is a compelling detail, because it directly matches up to the evil entity that we've been battling against throughout the entire game, The Mimic. You see, in the story Tiger Rock, the Mimic AI program takes the form of the digital entity Tiger Rock, a Tiger Animatronic with a green left eye and a blue right eye. Is this confirming for us that the Mimic AI and Baby are somehow one and the same? Or maybe that the mimic has two souls or entities that it learned from. Just like how Baby in the Books is two children in one, Elizabeth and Charlie. Not really sure, but that right there, that is a massive revelation that feels super important to solving the mystery.

Or at least it did, until I dug a bit more and found out that the scrap baby plushies also sometimes have their left eye missing. It is still a very cool, compelling connection that I'm not willing to fully discount yet. It's just not as consistent as I would have liked as far as evidence goes. The chair, meanwhile, looks like a disciplinary measure. A bad child that was put into timeout, forced to face into a corner and scratching away at the wall to count hours or days out of boredom. Since this is a room full of ghostly baby plushies, it stands to reason that the punished child here could have been Elizabeth. Obviously not physically here in this room of the Pizzaplex, but with this scene recreating a recurring moment from her past, in some ghostly spectral way. We know Afton wasn't really the greatest add to her, maybe this right here, it's a glimpse of his parenting style.

As for the tally marks in Bonnie's green room, the font is the same, so they were, likely carved by the same person, but honestly that's where the similarities end. These marks appear in AR land as opposed to babies which are in the real world. This implies that whoever made Bonnie's marks either had the Banny mask at some point or is connected to the digital network that's running the Pizaplex. Bonnie's marks are also higher up on the wall as opposed to babies which are at floor level, easily reachable by a small child. So then why these two rooms specifically? Well a few things come to mind. If baby is in fact connected in some way to the mimic and or the neural network that

runs the Pizziplex, we can get that Bonnie is too. When we deactivate the wet floorbots around the PizzaPlex we also end up deactivating Bonnie. So that connection into the wider Pizzaplex interface may be important here. We also know that both Baby and Bonnie are quote-unquote missing from the Pizzaplex. Baby isn't supposed to be here according to that AR description and Bonnie was decommissioned from the complex. Again, they're obviously loose threads but in a puzzle with no clear answer that somehow connects two very random historically unrelated characters

like Bonnie and Baby, every small detail here is absolutely worth considering. But that's more than enough talk about tallymarks. Let me remind you of yet another numerical code that was just blatantly given to us by the devs that us as a community have been largely unable to solve. Remember those Mylar balloons that I was just freaking out about in Superstar Daycare? Well, they have themselves yet another appearance right here. On the eighth hole of Security Breaches Monty Gator Golf Arcade Cabinet. On this balloon boy themed hole, we get this.

3192. That's suspicious. a handful of numbered balloons. In reality, the number sequence is actually a lot longer. 6369-553-392. The fact that these are in Monti Gator Golf immediately made me wonder whether this code was the score they had to get in the game, except there are 10 numbers and only 9 holes. But when is simple math ever stop the internet?

User 0-0-Core-Z0 tried a number of different combinations to see whether they could activate anything. Sadly nothing. Then Ruin released with a new Monti Gator Golf arcade cabinet, and so people like Yusuf 0808 tried again using this exact same code and still wound up with nothing. Here's the thing though, both of these games have been data-mined to heck and back. If this code was meant to unlock something inside of Monte Gator Golf,

we'd have heard about it already, which leads me to believe that it's something actually outside of the game. Much like I suspected with the tally marks, it's not about activating some hidden ending, it's about giving us a code, a cipher, a phrase that'll tell us something about the wider world. We just haven't figured out how to use it yet. I've tried converting the letters, ciphers, you name it,

just keep coming up empty-handed. of our writers even suggested trying hex codes to see if there might be something there. At first it looked positive. The last six numbers actually produce a purple that matches the aftons that we know and love so much. But it's not an exact match, nor does the first half of the numbers amount to anything meaningful. Maybe the fact that these are mylar balloons connected to the multi-colored milar balloons in the daycare, which then also connects them back to the tally mark puzzle, or maybe I'm just desperately looking for answers where there are no answers to be had. Now, for all of these lingering puzzles, I was able to find at least a couple of people discussing them online. in Discord, forums, Reddit posts, what have you.

But for this last one, nothing. Or, at least practically nothing. I could find only two posts total, which is exactly why I wanted to raise some awareness about it here, because to me, this seems like a massive clue that largely got overlooked during the wave of reveals that happened throughout ruin. Early on in the game, we have a chance to revisit

the daycare attendance room. This room is nothing new to a FNAF theorist. It was the one that we were able to unlock insecurity breach by photographing random characters throughout the game world. Inside of it, we were able to find the glitchy balloon world arcade cabinet, a lost relic to a seemingly incomplete path inside the game. So when the room showed up again in ruin, I wanted to pay extra attention. On the surface, the room seems largely the same, just a bit messier than before.

Boxes of stuff, clothing hanging from the wall, some post-it notes scattered around, but then by putting on the Vanney mask, everything resets to normal. The room basically goes back to the way that it was, cleaner, more organized, nothing all that noteworthy. Until of course, you start talking about the notes. Those are worthy. All of a sudden on a blank wall, we get ourselves a third. 3 by 3 grid of Post-it notes. What is it with Steelwall games and post-it note lore?

I mean, if I had a nickel for every time Steel Wool used post-it notes to hint it lore, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. The nine post-its that were dealing with her as follows. One that says groceries, with butter written three times. There's a collection of dots, a scribble, footprints, hearts and pizza, lightning bolt, sun and hill, stars in a microphone, and a selection of candy. As usual, my first thought was to jump into a cipher. Immediately you see how some of these post-its can relate to numbers. We have two feet, four stars, seven dots, three butters, three lightning bolts. Felt like a really solid place to start, but obviously it wasn't gonna be perfect. We have a pizza post-it, but are we counting the two slices of pizza, the four hearts, or both? What about that squiggle? What's that stand for? Nothing? How about the hill in the sun?

Is this meant to be FNAF six's graveyard hill, so maybe we're count gravest or is this more likely counting the number of rays coming off the sun? Overall, converting the post-its to numbers wasn't really given the cleanest solutions, but it did feel like a step in the right direction. From there, you look up how to solve 3x3 ciphers, the number one solution that pops up is the hill cipher. Now when it comes to codes, a hill cipher is pretty darn complex. But overall, the key to deciphering one is a matrix, a table of numbers. And if you're using the English alphabet with its 26 letters, you're going to need yourself a 3x3 matrix.

Or let's just say a 3 by 3 grid of post-it notes. The numbers in the matrix represent the shifts that you're going to have to apply to each letter of the alphabet. To encode a message using a hill cipher, you first convert the message into numbers. You can do this by assigning each letter of the alphabet a number for. from 0 to 25. For instance, A would be 0, B would be 1, and so on. Next, you multiply each letter of the message by the corresponding matrix.

For example, if the first letter your message is A, you would multiply it by the first row of the matrix. If the second letter of the message is B, you would multiply it by the second row of the matrix. The result is a new number, which you can then convert back into a letter giving you the encoded message. To decode, you just do the same in reverse. For instance, if I had this message,

hello, how are you? With this matrix, 321-1102020201, my encoded message would look a little something like this. I'm not even gonna try. Like I said, it's a pretty complex way of encoding something, but let's be honest with ourselves, when has FNAF ever not been complex? And after the wall code from security breach

got broken in a day, steel wool was probably looking for some that's a bit harder, some with a bit more lasting power. So really, a hill cipher seems to fit this new wall code nicely. There's just one problem. What exactly are we decoding? Sure, we have ourselves a rough matrix,

but where's the number or letter sequence that we're trying to put through it? The balloons, the tally marks? I ran them both through a few very, of my own matrix, three for butters, seven for dots, two for footprints, four hearts, etc., etc. But ultimately, I wound up with nothing to show for the whole thing. Again, it felt like we were getting close to a methodology, but I was just missing some crucial step in the process. So I tried a completely different approach.

Rather than ciphers, did this collection of images mean something to me? The candy to me looked very similar to the drawings that we saw in the original Post-it Room from Security Breach. Same goes with the pizzas. The lightning bolts are designed similarly to the charging stations found throughout the PizzaPlex, as well as the bolt of lightning on Glamrock Freddy's chest. Notice the flat tops on the lightning bolts, which makes them distinctly different from other lightning bolts that we've seen across the series,

like the controlled shock button from sister location. The microphone and stars reminds me of Freddy and the gang. This group of seven dots, certainly vague, but the number seven has shown up before in both FNAF VR and the Post-It Room of Security Breach. Usually it represents the seven victims. Five missing children, Charlie, and the crying child. Seven dots, seven graves.

You've got the hill in the sun, which is reminiscent of the hill during the Afton and Princess Quarice, and the butters were obvious references to sister location's exotic butters. Oph-O-I-X-Xotic butters. Overall, all the Post-It's seemed to relate in at least a small tangential way to Michael Afton. Man, he really is becoming like his dad, always coming back to our theories. Reddit user Pickman King X posted about these nine drawings and drew all of them back to two very important games, sister location and Pizzeria Simulator.

Two games where we for sure play as Michael Afton. First you got the candy that we spoke about. Well, in Pizzeria Simulator, candies all over the place. In advertisements from Lally's Lollies, gumball machines we can buy for the franchise, but the most important one of all, of course, is Candy Cadet, who actually winds up back in ruin. The Lightning Bolts also relate back to FNAF 6 as they're identical to the power-up that you collect in the Fruity Mays mini-game. Or, like I said, they can relate to the lightning bolt on Glamrock Freddy's chest,

and animatronic who many have theorized, myself included, has the soul of Michael Afton inside it. The Stars and Microphone call back to the four main rock star animatron Freddy, who holds the microphone along with Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy. The Sunny Hill, well, that's the iconic Fnaf 6 gravestone ending, with all five of the missing children, plus Charlie put to rest on the hill. Along with that, he'd be familiar with the seventh victim, his younger brother, the crying child, so if that's what these seven dots represent, he'd understand that symbolism.

Mike also has a strong love of pizza, as in the security logbook, he literally says it's the only reason to apply for the job, with hearts on the other pages that look similar to the ones that are on the post-its over here. Then there's the footprints. In true classic Fnaf theory fashion, Picman King X points out that these are three-toed footprints, and they're almost identical to the ones that we see in the other Fnaf 6 minigame, Midnight Motorist,

where there are two three-toed footprints outside of a broken window, or Michael's either the escapee who broke out of that window or the one sitting on the couch watching TV. The only thing unaccounted for here are the squiggly lines, but to me, that could just represent Ennard, or the tangle, or whatever robot spaghetti this franchise wants to throw at the wall at this point. Could this mean that Michael, might in fact be alive, that he's living inside the Pizzaplex trying to finish the job that he started?

Maybe that's the entire reason the sister location room exists in the pizzaplex in the first place. Maybe it's him talking to the recreation of his younger brother. Maybe he learned the language of the mimic that his father used to communicate with the monster that killed his sister, like we predicted in a previous theory. All signs here point to Michael or not. Let me be perfectly clear. This is broad speculation based on a piece of evidence that has clearly not been solved yet. And honestly, that's why I need your help.

You've seen all the theory threads that I've been pulling, all the ciphers and interpretations that I've tried here, and we're still none the wiser. There are solutions out there for all of these puzzles. I am almost sure of that. But I need the collective hive mind of the FNAF community behind me to pitch out some solutions. The theorists of Reddit I called out today have done an amazing job getting the ball rolling, and I do truly believe that with a bit more time and a bit more focus, together we can solve these mysteries. Last time I did a theory like this, it was five years ago. About 48 hours later, you all had collectively discovered the name Cassidy,

hidden inside the security logbook. And now it is one of the most solid, concrete, important pieces of information that we've ever had for the lore of this franchise. Let's try to do that again here. One or all of these puzzles are gonna lead to some sort of massive revelation. Till that day comes friends, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!