Game Theory - I SOLVED Ruin! (FNAF Security Breach)

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Join Game Theory MatPat as he gives his prediction on the story of the new FNAF Ruin DLC! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Tyler Mascola, Koen Verhagen, Warak, and KL Allen Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Oh internet, welcome to game theory, where today it's the best of times and it's the worst of times. First, let me catch you up on the big FNAF drama. Let me set the stage. It's April. All of team theorist over here is just finished slaving away on our massive timeline for the series. We've done it. We are on the beach, coconut drinks in our hands, eager to take a break from the franchise until ruins release later in the year. But nope. Scott had himself some other plans. He smacked those beverages, clean out of our hands, and released three new books. Sub-mechanophobia, the Bobby Dot's conclusion, and next. Now, normally that wouldn't be too much of a concern, right? Books tied to this franchise have been coming out for years. It's just part of the content treadmill at this point.

And it's not like they tend to add a whole lot. Only one in like every six stories is even remotely lore relevant. And even then, the connection back to the games only exists if you squint at it. But oh no, friends, not this time. Across the three books, story after story after story seems to have significant lore implications. And not only that, they're also much more direct in the way that the information is presented, with characters and events mapping largely one-for-one onto characters and events from the games.

If you're not in the habit of reading these things, and let's be honest, why would you when I could just do the homework for you? What I'm talking about might be a bit confusing, so I'm just going to explain by way of example. In GGI, one of the four stories that set the internet on fire, a young boy named Greg, with brown hair and big brown eyes, is a master hacker, who's been reprogramming the animatronics at the Pizzaplex for evil deeds, including bumping off three school counselors that seem to be getting too close to the truth. He also has himself a habit of being really good at the Pizzaplex's arcade games, leaving behind his initials GGY at the top of the game's leaderboards. Now, compare that information to what we get in the games.

There's a young boy named Gregory with the brown hair and big brown eyes, who seems to be Patient 46, a master hacker that's reprogramming the animatronics at the Pizzaplex for evil deeds, including bumping off three therapist characters that also seemed to be getting too close to the truth. He also has himself the habit of leaving the letters GGY at the top of the leaderboards at Verville. Arcade cabinets throughout the Pizzaplex. Now that right there, that is not counting animatronic toes and trying to match up striped shirts. That is about as explicit of a one-to-one parallel that you get for this franchise. So when the story also reveals that Greg's nickname is a rab, aka Doctor Rabbit, you stand up and take notice.

And you know what? The internet sees it. They recognize the connections and how important the books have suddenly become. No longer am I out there on my own little island, shouting into the void about using the books to inform our speculation about the lore. Finally, the internet agrees with. agrees with me. To me, this is a huge step in the right direction in terms of figuring out the wider lore of the franchise. You know, there's just one teeny tiny little problem with this. No one can quite agree just how seriously to take this lore. After years of denying the book's canonicity, there's suddenly been a massive swing of the pendulum the complete other way, where now many pockets of the FNAF community vehemently believe that these most recent stories are fully canon with the games. In other words, we're no longer talking about an alternate universe where events are similar to the games, but with slight differences, Oh no! Now the debate is all about whether what you read in the books also happened in the pizzaplex that we play through in the games. So before we dive into that, can of worms, let's just talk about the stories themselves.

I already filled you in on GGY, which means it's time to talk about the other three which tell themselves a connected timeline of events. Starting with the first, the mimic. This is the one that everyone has been losing their collective minds over. This story tells the tale of Edwin, a genius inventor and single father, and his hyperactive son David. Basically, Edwin is overworked. Years ago, he sold his struggling robotics company to Fasbear Entertainment, who now has him hard at work turning their, quote, weird costumes into entertaining robots. With the first one that he's working on being a bright yellow chick. There's just one problem here, David. David is four in all the best and worst ways possible.

It means that he's sweet and excitable, but it also means that he's moody and demands a lot of time and attention. Two things that Edwin does not have. So to fix his problem and get himself more work time, Edwin creates a piece of software known as mimic 1. Using some spare robot parts, he makes a legless endoskeleton that's able to copy everything. that David does. Basically, this thing's an AI that's using David as his training data. And while Mimic 1 starts by merely copying David, pretty soon it's able to respond on its own independently. And David loves this thing, which means that Edwin is finally able to disappear into his work. Everything seems to be going well until tragedy strikes. An unsupervised David

runs out into the middle of a busy highway and is killed. Edwin is devastated, and he takes all his rage out on the mimic, this robot that continues to behave like his son, infusing the metal of the bot with pure agony. We then flash forward in time to Edwin being gone, and the mimic roaming the halls of his abandoned home, a brutal killer still in possession of David's childlike tendencies. So, does any of that sound familiar? Because

it should. It's Henry Emily. A genius inventor who helped to create the robots of Fasbear Entertainment. A man who also happens to be a single father whose only child dies in a tragic accident when they decide to run outside. A creator whose first project was Chica. Now, that alone would be plenty of connected dots, but the story

continues to hammer home the parallels between these two men. In past videos, I've talked a lot about Henry's signature animatronic design, the hinged jaws that we see on the original animatronics, as well as the rock star animatronics. Well, guess what? This is how Edwin decided to build the mimic. Quote, under the eye housing, Edwin had welded in place a hinged jaw. Speaking of Edwin's robots, do you know what Edwin's first business project was? He made robotic vacuum cleaners. Presumably like the ones that we see in Fnaf 6,

Edwin and Henry even share the same sandy brown hair color. But the other big parallel that the story gives us is when Edwin destroys the mimic. The way this event is described is very similar to when Henry built the final Charlie bot from the fourth closet novel. Here's how it's described in Tales of the Pizabeth's. He could almost feel his murderous thoughts pouring through his muscles, transfusing through the metal into mimic systems. And here's what happens when Henry builds the Charlie bot after her death. Quote from that book, when Henry began to make the fourth, his despair turned to rage. He seethed as he soldered her skeleton together, pouring his anger into the forge where he shaped her very bones.

It was not Charlotte drenched in grief. It was made alive with Henry's heart. fury. In both instances, we have men who have instilled their creations, animatronics that are literal stand-ins for their dead kids, with the pain and rage of loss. If that's not a solid connection, I don't know what is. Even from a timeline perspective, Edwin being Henry makes a lot of sense. In the mimic, they specifically call out that he's 24 years old. After the death of his son, he disappears. But then, in another tale from the Pizsoplex, this one called the storyteller, we meet up with Edwin 40 years later, at the point that he decides to return to the Fasbear franchise to sit

on their board of directors. Again, the books make a very specific point to call out all these dates. So why? What's the big deal here? Well, if Edwin is truly the parallel for Henry, Henry lost his daughter Charlie in 1983. We're not exactly sure when he leaves the company, but we definitely know when he comes back, 2023, as evidenced by the numerical code in FNAF 6. 40 years later. A perfect match to the time frame that the books have laid out. In short, Edwin has to be Henry, which means, in a very cool twist, our early franchise timeline was almost perfectly correct. In that video I said that William Afton's company specialized in hand-sown mascot suits, and that Henry, when he was brought in, was the one responsible for

turning those suits into animatronics. That prediction right there, that was right on the money. I was also on the right track when I said that one of the two founders had their failing company get bought out. I was just wrong about which one. In that timeline video, I suggested that Afton made Fasbury Entertainment, but eventually ran out of money and had to be bailed out by Henry. But as this story shows, it's actually the other way around. Henry was ultimately the one that was bought out. And in one final parallel between the books and the games, the story actually describes the Fasbear exec that gets Edwin to sign away his business as portly, which connects all the way back to the Silver Eyes, where Afton was described in a similar way. Quote, Afton was as robust and

lively as Henry was withdrawn and shadowy. He was a hefty man who had the ruddy geniality of a financially shrewd Santa Claus. Okay, cool, so we've got some confirmation on some early parts of the franchise, but what does any of this mean for security breach? Well, that's where the second Edwin story comes in, the storyteller. In this one, we rejoin Edwin 40 years later. Because of his importance to the early days of Fazbear Entertainment, he now sits on the board of directors. A fact, that does not land too well with the current head of the board, Mr. Burroughs.

Get it? His name's Burroughs, because everyone's always connected to rabbits. Anyway, to cut costs at the Pizzaplex, Mr. Burroughs decides to lay off the entire creative department. Instead, replacing them with a generative AI that's capable of creating new storylines for all the characters. Basically, this thing is like chat GPT on steroids. This, understandably upsets Edwin, who apparently has gone from engineering nerd, to creative heart of the company. But he's not just a WGA member that's upset about some writers guild's writes.

What makes matters worse is the fact that Mr. Burroughs isn't using just any AI, he's installing Mimic One, the same program that Edwin created, the one that was trained by his son 40 years prior. When they install it, it even comes in the form of his son's favorite toy, a white tiger head.

And here's where things start to get real crazy. This AI controls everything in the Pizza Plex. It runs through a large central tree of wires that are connected through the walls, even tapping into things like the animatronics themselves, In fact, once the Mimic 1 program gets installed, the behavior of all the animatronics starts to change from their normal personalities into something that's a bit more like a 4-year-old. They start to become possessive. They get into Tug-a-war matches over toys. They sulk in the corner and cry. David is somehow getting infused into everything that this AI touches.

Eventually, Edwin attempts to shut the Mimic 1 program down, but he dies in the process. However, in his final moments, he attempts to communicate with his son inside the AI. You see, in the Mimic story, Edwin watches David communicating with his robot buddy using a made-up language described like. this. Quote, David and Mimic had been doing all manner of odd little drawings that were surrounded by markings that looked vaguely like hieroglyphics. Edwin then uses this same language to communicate with the Mimic software at the end of the storyteller.

Quote again, every sheet of paper was covered with odd stick drawings and strange symbols that were not at all familiar to Mr. Burroughs. Squiggles, squares, loops, triangles within triangles. So why is this story such a big deal right now in the FNAF community? Well, everyone knows it's important, it's just that no one can truly settle on what it's trying to say. which means it's time for me to do my best to try and break it all down. Now, I've already mentioned the parallels between Edwin and Henry.

But what that also suggests is that Edwin's son David may just be an analog for Henry's only child Charlie. Not that they're one and the same or following the exact chain of events, but rather that where David goes in the books, we should be looking for Charlie to follow in the games. And in the story, the mimic one AI that was trained using David winds up controlling the Pizzaplex and all its animatronics via an intricate system of wires. This, to me, is the book suggesting that we should probably be looking for Charlie to be doing the same thing in the games, and wouldn't you know it, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest exactly that.

Throughout security breach, there are wires everywhere, black and white striped wires that look very similar to everyone's favorite possessed puppet, Charlie. There are also the staff bots roaming around looking like a twisted version of the puppet. We also see several unexplained nightmarry own plushies hidden in strange locations throughout the building. Again, suggesting that an angry version of Charlie may just be at work within the walls of the building. During my complete timeline, I suggested that the reason we were seeing so much puppet imagery throughout the Pizzaplex is because Charlie's possessing the building, Poultergeist style. Just like the house in that movie is possessed by angry spirits, the Pizzaplex is haunted by Charlie because it's built on top of the location of the Fnaf 6 fire.

Basically, her physical form may be gone, but her spirit is still going to haunt the building until Afton is destroyed. And again, I think that this latest story confirms that I was close about the what, but not necessarily about the how. Charlie is still very much here, but it's not a haunting, it's technological. And look at this. The wires are even formed in such a way that they look like the trunk and branches of a tree, exactly the way the mimics wires

are described to run through the pizzaplex in the book. Just like David's consciousness infected everything in the pizzaplex during the tale story, so too is Charlie infecting everything in the pizzaplex of the games. But that's not all. Remember that in the book, Edwin uses an elaborate code of symbol, sticks, and shapes to communicate with his son inside of the pizzaplex.

It's designed as an elaborate code of triangles within triangles. That right there, that is the wall code in Security Breaches Secret Room. Remember that one? If not, here's the abbreviated translation. Break and mend, I built the breath. They hunt now, drawn to life. The storyteller here is given us a clue that this wall code,

these triangles within triangles, they were written by Henry. How? When? Not sure. Honestly, we hadn't even considered him as a possible person to have written this because he was supposed to be dead in the Fnaf 6 fire. But if you look at the text with him in mind, the pieces all fit. Henry did build the breath. He was the creator of the animatronics. And in all stories about Henry, we hear about him repurposing old robotic parts.

He is breaking and mending them. But midway through, this coded message starts to switch tone. It starts giving instructions. Quote again, dodge, duck. Flash, shoot, crawl, run, crush the vile band. Your life, your aim will save those with soul. He's teaching someone their mission. He's giving some robotic AI their instructions

just like Edwin was trying to communicate with the AI in the book. It is their task to save those with soul. But look specifically at the verbs that are written here, especially shoot and flash. This one has to be talking to Gregory. Not only is he the one that's crushing the vile band of the Pizza Pizeplex, All of those actions are things that he performs in the game. He is the only one shooting with the Fas Blaster.

He is the only one flashing with the FasCAM. It seems like Henry, in a last failsafe against FASBair, may have built a protector using an AI program and spoke to it using his triangle within triangle code. And that protector has to be Gregory. I know, I know, I can't let robot Gregory go. I get it. But how else do you explain this? No one else is flashing and shooting.

And remember, the story GGY confirms to us that Gregory is patient 46, whose secret therapy tapes are played right next to where this code is in the very same room. Everything in this one room is screaming that the message is for Gregory, written in a code that the books tell us is reserved for robot brains. But this then raises two major questions. First, how could I say that Gregory's a robot when we see him in GGY as just a kid at school? And secondly, GGY makes it clear that Gregory is a villain, hacking into the animatronics and using them to kill people.

Apparently, all three of your former therapists have gone missing, or two of them are missing. one of them was found dead. The woman's body was pretty messed up. It looked like it was mangled by machinery. Gregory's pen name for a large portion of the book is Dr. Rabbit, for crying out loud. If that doesn't scream, oh, by the way, I'm also working for Afton, I don't know what does. He even calls himself the wizard's most favorite apprentice.

So how can I say that he's working for Henry when it's very clearly being told to us that he's also working for William? Well, first off, we never actually see confirmation that he's a human in the books. In fact, we largely get the opposite. Gregory is actually described in the book as, quote, An unfamiliar kid who looked a little lost at the start of the school year. So there's no past with this kid, no growing old together with a group of friends. He just appeared out of nowhere one day.

What's more, whenever his friends do something odd, Gregory reacts in a very robotic way. He cocks his head and he has a weird pause in his behavior. Is that a lot to go off of? No. But also nothing about him explicitly says that he's necessarily human, or that he's just the reluctant follower of Afton. But obviously the bigger question here is how? How can he be both a protector bot and an agent of Afton? often at the same time. This is also a question that's raised in the books. If G.GY is saying that Gregory and GlitchTrap are in control of the animatronics, but then the storyteller is saying that an AI version of Charlie is controlling the animatronics. Who's actually in control here?

Both of these stories feel crucial to understanding security breach's lore, and yet they seem to contradict each other. So what is going on? Well, for that answer, we actually have to go to the trailer for the new security breach DLC, ruin. In the last few seconds of footage for this new game, we see a glitching techno rabbit, glitching between two colors, green and purple. This is a is known as chromatic aberration, which is when the lens of a camera is unable to focus the different colors of light into the exact same point. Usually they see this sort of thing with red and blue, sometimes red and green. Purple and green is not usually the natural color combination for this sort of effect, which means that it's trying to tell us something. And this isn't the only time we see it. If you go over to security breach TV.com, which has been the go-to location for all online teasers for these games, the website has the steel wool logo down in the corner, glitched again between purple and green. Not only that, they're reverses of each other.

Not just reflections, but actually facing in opposite directions. Well, we know that purple is always going to be the villain color. It's evil. That is a given for this franchise. But green, that then, is probably the opposite color. The hero color. And while it could represent Elizabeth with her signature green eyes, but I suspect is more likely is that the green is Charlie. The color of the security puppet's eyes.

The color of the wristband that she was wearing the night that she died. All green. So within Gregory, and honestly within all of these animatronics, there's a capacity for both good and evil. Glitch trap is in the code, obviously, he's purple, but there's also a force for good, Charlie, in there as well as green. And what we're playing through is a battle between these two to ultimately decide who wins. That's why the tiger head and the tales from the Pizzaplex story has two differently colored eyes. It shows two forces at work within the same program.

This also explains why throughout the game the other animatronics are getting corrupted, but why Glamrock Freddy isn't. He's booted in safe mode. The storyteller establishes that all the animatronics are hooked into the computer network that controls the Pizzaplex. By glitching out and then rebooting in safe mode, Glamrock Freddy is separated from that system, as well as any sort of corruption that's happening within it. And just like that, it all became crystal clear. The reason we have two stories telling us about two different sources of control

over the animatronics and the Pizablex isn't because Scott changed his mind or because steel wool didn't get the memo, it's because ruin is literally going to be a battle for control. The forces of evil, glitch trap, versus the forces for good, Charlie. One who wants to kill kids and use their souls to gain eternal life, and another who wants to put it all to rest and protect those who can still be saved. And Gregory is stuck there in the middle, both of them existing inside of him. Like he says himself at the end of the trailer,

Don't give up on me yet. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.