Game Theory - The SECRET Crimes of 1985 (FNAF)

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he takes us back in time to 1985 in a little place called Freddy Fazbears Pizzarea. *Credits* Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors: Tyler Mascola, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Race you to the ball pit. Hey, that's no fair. I haven't got my shoes off yet. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Made it. Ozzie? Oz. Oz.

Ozzy! Ozzy! Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory and the start to what will undoubtedly be a very fnappy new year because everyone else in the games industry has concentrated on new consoles with all of the Terraflops and none of the actual games. Five Nights at Freddy's is over here in the corner doing and its own thing in release and, you know, exciting and interesting stuff. Last year's Help Wanted was a fantastic addition to the series,

which keeps updating itself with new and exciting lore all the time. There's that new 80s-inspired game coming out later this year. The AR game is something I should probably talk about at some point, since apparently that also has lore implications. And most interestingly of all, we have ourselves the rollout of a new book series, Fasbear Frights. The first one released after Christmas, and before the end of this year, There'll be a total of...

Let me check my notes. Holy mother of entered five? Five installments in a new book series in a year? Mm. Looks like Scott's gone back to his roots of just mass-releasing stuff. It's like you saw the Netflix model of binge watching a show and was like, I want that, but for video games. And apparently books.

Geez, if only mass-drop lore reveals for us to binge understand, we'd all be happier for it. Anyway, the reason I call these books out is that first off, they're just really good. You ever read the Goosebubbs books? I definitely did. Every single one. Night on the Living Dummy and Ghost Next Door every day, fam. Well, Fasbear Frights is just a modern version of those, with each book containing three short horror stories all set within the FNAF universe.

And, true to them being a part of the franchise, they aren't afraid to get super bleak. Today's episode is going to go into detail for the first three, so if you want to read them blind, consider this your spoiler warning. Anyway, to give you a sense of tone, One story ends with a girl finding her severed body parts hidden away in plastic bags, only to then realize that she herself has been piece by piece replaced with a robotic body. In another, a teenage girl's imprisoned and forced to choose the way in which she is gonna die,

with options ranging from boiling alive to electrocution to decapitation. She chooses the decap attack. Dear Fnaf Tubers, I know we were all super worried about Kappa coming in and striking us down, but when we're covering stories like these, I think we're pretty darn safe. But of course, I wouldn't be talking about all this on game theory if it wasn't for the lore. These aren't just random horror stories. Each one is connected back to characters and locations that we know from the original games. The girl who makes a wish to be beautiful and then is unknowingly hacked to pieces?

Well, the fairy godmother doing the hacking is a red-pig-tailed clown robot with green eyes. Does that description sound familiar to anyone? What about the girl who opts for decapitation? Well, I mentioned that she's imprisoned. What I left out was that she's actually trapped in the stomach of a white and pink bear with a twisted sense of humor and a thirst for blood. And if all that's too subtle for ya, well, the first story outright has a guy in a golden bunny suit taken us to see six murdered kids in the back of a Freddy's Pizzeria in the year 1985. Pretty darn direct, but more on that later. These stories matter because they're giving us more information about how the FNAF universe operates,

Sometimes in very direct ways, like giving us the exact number of murder victims and the dates of their death, and sometimes in more indirect ways. By showing us that this is a canon where a girl can be rebuilt day by day piece by piece as a human robot hybrid so realistic that no one, not even herself, realizes it. And so that is what we're covering today. What these stories show us about the FNAF universe, what they confirm, and also what important new details they unlock. Plus, they open up a big theory about the games, one that I actually got

got wrong late last year, and I'm very excited about now. So with all that said, reader beware, you're in for a scare. Oh, and for those of you who've dismissed the stories as non-canon, I wouldn't be too quick to judge these books. Each one of them has this in its official description. Quote, in this volume, Horror Master Scott Cawthins three sinister novella-length stories from different corners of his series' canon. End quote. Different corners of the canon, you say. Sounds to me like some stories are going to be more aligned with the trilogy of books, some more so with the canon of the games, but still all of them existing within the canon itself.

So absolutely worth our time to investigate. The first story actually has a lot to cover, so I'm gonna just save that one for last and instead start with a second. To be beautiful. In it, Sarah, a 14-year-old girl rescues a red pig-tailed clown animatronic from the trunk of a car that she finds in the scrapyard. Grateful to be saved, the robot, who calls herself Eleanor, but is probably better described as giraffe. A draft baby based on the cut illustrations from the book says that she'll grant any wish. Sarah wishes to be beautiful, and baby like a twisted fairy godmother makes it happen. By putting Sarah to sleep every night and hacking off sections of her body while she's unconscious,

replacing them with robotic junk. Quote, Sarah looked at the floor. One bag contained a human leg, another, a human arm. Blood pooled in the bottoms of the bags, but the limbs had been severed neatly, as if in a surgical amputation. Another bag stuffed with bloody snake-like entrails in what appeared to be a liver Slid from the cabinet shelf and landed on the floor with a wet splat. Hey, if pizzerias never work out for you baby, Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon is a great backup career. The only stipulation is that Sarah must wear a special necklace to keep the illusion alive.

When the necklace inevitably falls off, Sarah's new junk body is exposed and falls apart. She dies, surrounded by her own severed body parts as she's forced to watch baby walk out into the the world having stolen her old look and identity. Quote again, I made your wish come true, Sarah, and in return, Eleanor laughed again. She jerked and shook. Her silver finished turning the pinkish shade

of Caucasian skin. In a matter of moment, she was a dead ringer for Sarah. Well, you certainly made my wishes come true. Great story to read to the kids at night, by the way. Good night, sleep tight, don't let the shape-shifting robots slice off your face and steal it! Anyway, as I mentioned before, Sarah's extreme makeover confirms that in the FNAF canon, humans can be partly or fully robotic without ever knowing it. We've seen it before in the original trilogy of books,

where the fourth closet revealed that protagonist Charlie was a highly advanced robot, and we're seeing it again happen here. A normal human, Sarah, unknowingly being remade into a robot. The fact that this is now a recurring element of the series goes to support the idea that Michael, the crying child of Fnaf 4, after getting bitten, could have been put back together in a much more literal way than any of us were expecting, those years ago. He was put together as a machine. He grew up without knowing it and was only able to figure it all out once he miraculously survived being scooped at the end of sister location.

But something is wrong with me. I should be dead, but I'm not. Does this little short story outright confirm any of it? No, certainly not, but third time is a charm, Michael. The third story about a girl named Millie trapped inside Fun Time Freddy's stomach doesn't really tell us a whole lot. But instead it just confirms what we're already suspected. That the Fun Time robots were designed to be large enough to capture kids and either kill them off or transport them to underground testing facilities. Moving on to the end of the book there's a little teaser like a Marvel movie but with a hundred percent less Nick Fury where you get a preview of a seemingly new monster. Two cops are

discussing a hooded figure raiding the neighborhood's dumpsters. They call it the Stitch Rave. Quote, the stitch rave witnesses said was a shrouded figure in some sort of cloak. The detective squinted at a picture that showed the figure pulling what seemed to be a mannequin's torso from the dumpster. The The face wasn't a face, not a human face anyway. It looked more like a mask. The face was round, and its features were drawn onto the curved white surface. It had dark eyes, one of which looked blackened, were those bloodstains around the mouth.

End quote. To me, the stitch-rath is just a cooler name for Ennard. I mean, you got yourself a creature that has a white mask with a missing blacked-out eye, sharp, potentially bloody teeth, and a lurching walk. Definitely similar to the way that he's shown in the games, Enard's obsession with trash would also be a for the Stitch Rath. I mean, it's just a massive wires. It needs something like a mannequin torso to give it form. We actually see the same thing with scrap babies design from Fnaf 6 Between games, she clearly assimilated any and all garbage into her form to be more passable and human. To me, I gotta be honest, I just think the Stitch Rath story is cool because it shows the outside world's reaction to the Freddy creatures that we all know It starts to show what happened to him after the events of the game. It connects the dots for the story after the credits finished rolling to know that Enard after he escapes from

sister location to the in-universe people going about their daily lives is just this urban legend named the Stitch Rave. I guess that's just pretty interesting to me. I think it's fun. Anyway, it's also worth noting here that the teaser attributes five dead bodies to Enard. Quote, five, five withered bodies with eyes that bled black down the sides of the face, end quote. So it appears that Enard, after leaving Michael's body, tried to skin suit five or so other people. Notice that it says withered bodies. These are bodies that have clearly decayed, just like we saw with Michaels at the the end of sister location. And the mode of death, them crying black. It's just the body leaking oil as Enard needs to go and find another skin suit to possess. So that's pretty much everything else, but what I really want to focus on now and in a follow-up mini theory is the first story of this bunch.

The story where the book gets its name, into the pit. In it, a video game-loving, anime-obsessed 10-year-old boy named Oswald is forced to spend most of his summer in an old rundown restaurant named Jeff's Pizza. One day, wanting to pull a prank on his father, he finds himself in In a, wait for this, time-traveling ball pit, that takes him to 1985, the day where six murders have just happened at Freddie Fasbear's Pizzeria. Quote, when the smell of pizza hit Oswald's nose, he understood. He was still in Jeff's Pizza, or more accurately, what Jeff's pizza had been before Jeff took over. The ball pit was new and not roped off.

On the wall was a mural of the same characters performing on stage, the brown bear, the blue rabbit, and the bird girl. Below their faces were the words Freddy Fasbear's Peecephers. He even caught sight of a calendar hanging in an open office that helped him pinpoint the date 1885." End quote. Way to take the mystery out of it there, guys! I was already to cross-reference all the arcade cabinets that you saw in the pizzeria and the allusions to the Smurfs and other popular media at the time to find the date,

but you just had to go and take that all away from me. Thanks for saving me the research, I guess. But no thanks for taking away my deserving YouTube Watch Minutes. And here's the first big mind blow of this book series. First, because I think there are actually two in this one story. In this story, we get ourselves clear, indisputable evidence that in 1985, six kids were killed. Quote, the rabbit stopped in front of a door with a sign reading party room. Half a dozen kids, none of them older than Oswald, their lifeless bodies propped into sitting positions,

their legs stretched out in front of them. They were all wearing Freddy Fazbear birthday party hats. Oswald couldn't tell how they died, but he knew the rabbit was responsible for it. that the rabbit had wanted him to see his handiwork, end quote. On one hand, it's incredible to finally get ourselves a date and a firm number of dead children. Yay! But get ready to change your Facebook status because it is complicated. You see, 1985 has never once been an important date in the series.

1983? Absolutely, that's FNAF 4. 1987, you betcha, that's FNAF 2. We've got ourselves 80s representation everywhere. Mullets and Oingo Boingo for days, but never! Not once has there ever been a mention of 1985. And while it might be easy to immediately write that off as a typo or some non-canon event, it's definitely not. Far from it. In fact, for as wacko as it seems, this time-traveling ball pit from a short story and a spin-off series of books takes Oswald back to a pizzeria that we've never seen before, but one that we have

absolutely known to have existed since the second game in this series. And As proof, let me pull up a clip from my second ever episode on FNAF, back when Purple Guy was actually Phone Guy. Oh, those were the days. Every way to Sunday, this game is a prequel. Posters everywhere in Five Nights 2 welcome you to this new location, implying that there was another Freddy Fasbear's pizza somewhere before this one. Additionally, the phone guy makes reference to it on night one, mentioning the old location and how it was left to rot. So let me recap. There's the restaurant from the first game, which is the last in the timeline.

The one that you're currently working at in 1987, in Five Nights 2, an older location of Freddy Fasbear's Pizzeria left to rot, and the original Fred Bears Diner. In FNAF 2, we're presented with newspaper clippings that outright says that this location is having a grand reopening. But we knew, even way back then five years ago, that the events of FNAF 1 took place after FNAF 2. It was a prequel sequel sequel, so there had to have been a Freddy Fazbear's pizza that it prior to FNAF2 that got the franchise shut down in the first place. We also know that it wasn't Fred Bear's family diner because phone guy calls that restaurant out separately.

Hello and welcome to your new summer job at the new and improved. Fred contact the original restaurant out. So in this one random little scene from Fasbear Frights, we uncover a pivotal piece of the timeline that's been missing for the last five years. A mystery pizzeria that's been gone since the very beginning of this franchise. pizzeria that looks to be home to the first six actual murders of the Fasbear story. In fact, I can actually do you one better. I believe this to be the six dead kids that we end up reuniting in the happiest day minigame from FNAF 3. Notice that detail about all of them wearing party hats.

These were kids all taken from the same party. And the happiest day minigame from FNAF 3 has us reuniting them to finally finish the birthday party. They got prematurely and gruesomely cut short. This is huge information here, guys! However, true to form, as it always is with this story, not everything lines up. With this being chronologically the earliest set of murders that we see at a pizzeria set before 1987, then we should be seeing the animatronics get possessed here. It's something that we've never actually seen in the games.

This should be the missing children's incident, where the victim's bodies are shoved into the suits never to be found. But it's clearly not. The book makes it very obvious that these bodies were clearly out and visible. Quote again, there were noises. but not the usual ones of Freddy Fasbears. Screens, crying children, yells for help, chaos. Oswald's stomach and knots, he moved through the crowd, past crying mothers running with their toddlers in their arms,

past dads grasping children's hands and leading them swiftly towards the exit, their faces masks of shock, end quote. The bunny had laid out all his victims for everyone to see, a far cry from the bodies being shoved into the suits and then not being discovered for years on end, hence the missing children's incident. And we know that the missing children's incident is most likely where the animatronics got possessed because, you know, their bodies are in the suits, along with the metal. And so the metal and the souls fused together to create living animatronics. Roll into fnaf 2, 1987. Oh my gosh, look, there's living animatronics roaming around this pizzeria. Oh, and we installed security devices just because we know a murderer came around the last time. There's a reason I stopped talking about the timeline of these things. Additionally, there are six children dead when the missing children's incident only had itself five. That in and of itself would be okay, right? Since FNAF six, six children has always been the magic number. It's weird to mention a magic

number when talking about murdered children, but you know what? This series desensitizes you till a lot. Our list is Susie, Fritz, Gabriel, Jeremy, Cassidy, and Charlotte. The Core 4 animatronics, Golden Freddy, and The Puppet. The Problem is, Charlotte the Puppet, always seems to have a separate death outside of the building, outside of the realm of the other five children. So having her suddenly lined up with all the rest of the kids at the same time just doesn't make a whole heck of a lot a sense. I don't know. Maybe I just need to think on it more because everything else lines up. We have ourselves a golden bunny leading kids down a hallway into a back room, just like those original newspaper clippings described. He's also very clearly visible, which means he'd likely

be taken into custody. Again, just like those original newspaper clippings described. As it always is with the series, so many items line up, but there's just one or two little details, little sticking points that make the pieces fit a little awkwardly. I honestly think though that this isn't the last time that we're going to be seeing this pizzeria. Remember earlier when I mentioned that new FNAF game that's coming out in 2020? A little bit later this year, probably titled into madness. Well, that one is set in a mall with a very 80s theme. Again, we've been talking about the rock star animatronics for a couple episodes now,

and that's the one where they get revealed. It wouldn't be surprising for me to see that game be the one where we finally stepped foot inside the first ever, Freddie Fasbear's Pizzeria. And witness all the events that Oswald just saw for ourselves. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.