Game Theory- FNAF, Help Me SOLVE The Impossible!
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00 I told you that the purple guy was the phone guy and now here we are.
00:03 William Afton, our killer, is on a phone saying "See you on the flip side"
00:08 just like phone guy did all those years ago.
00:11 Finally! I've been vindicated.
00:13 Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show where every victory is bittersweet.
00:21 You see, while I should be super happy that I just had one of my oldest FNAF theories confirmed,
00:26 instead, I'm feeling haunted by the unsolved mysteries of the past.
00:29 Let me explain.
00:30 At this point in the series, I feel like we have a really solid understanding of the story.
00:33 We know the broad strokes, we know the general timeline,
00:36 and the few big lingering questions that we've struggled with are starting to come into focus.
00:40 Where's the placement of Sister Location?
00:42 All the most recent games and books have hinted at its connection to the Fredbear era.
00:45 What's the origins of Fazbear?
00:47 Well, the books seem to be giving us more and more hints pointing at the early days of William and Henry's working relationship.
00:52 What was the deal with FNAF 4?
00:54 Literally, the final tale of the Pizza Plex all but spells it out for us.
00:58 All of those are probably theories best saved for a later date,
01:01 but today, I wanted to focus on something else.
01:03 The clues that we've all completely missed.
01:05 The times when this franchise has explicitly tried to tell us something,
01:09 and we've utterly failed to pick up on what it's been laying down.
01:12 And let me be clear, I'm not talking about me overanalyzing some minor detail of the game world.
01:16 I'm talking about very clear puzzles that were very obviously set up by the game makers for us to solve,
01:21 that we've been unable to do anything with.
01:23 And the reason I'm calling it out now is because they're starting to add up.
01:26 In my estimation, there have been no less than four of these sorts of major puzzle moments.
01:30 At least three of them are connected, and it's been going on for the better part of six years.
01:35 So, now that we're all done fangirling over Doug's apps,
01:37 "I finally got my appetizers."
01:39 "Thanks, MatPat."
01:40 Before help wanted two drops and adds a whole new layer of mysteries to solve,
01:44 I wanted to take a minute to stop and see if now, finally, we were able to solve these mysteries once and for all.
01:49 The pieces are in place for us.
01:51 The question is, are we able to put them together?
01:54 The first one of these is also the most recent, so it should come as no surprise to see me bringing it up here.
01:58 The tally marks codes that we found hidden throughout FNAF Ruin.
02:01 For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about,
02:03 in the newest game, right before you reach Bonnie Bowl,
02:05 there's a corridor with a number of real doors, as well as several blocked off AR doors.
02:09 If you walk through one of the real life doors, you'll find a room full of baby plushies.
02:13 This is already a bit weird, because the game makes it a point to call out the fact that baby should not be here.
02:18 Specifically with the AR plush baby toy, where the description reads, quote, "What's she doing here?"
02:22 The answer, we suspect, is that the Pizzaplex, Sister Location, the FNAF 6 Location, and the FNAF 4 House
02:28 are all practically built on top of each other.
02:30 Or, at the very least, exist as one connected series of buildings.
02:34 We go into the basement of the Pizzaplex, only to find the FNAF 6 Location.
02:38 In a secret ending of Ruin, we see a version of Sister Location's scooper deactivating the Mimic.
02:42 And in one of the final Tales of the Pizzaplex stories,
02:45 we read about how the FNAF 4 House is connected to Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rentals.
02:49 So really, to answer Cassie's question, the baby plushies are here because they all share a connected history.
02:55 A history that is gradually being excavated layer by layer underneath the Pizzaplex.
03:00 Anyway, in this room, the dolls laugh at you, and then, when you turn around, they disappear.
03:03 Nothing all that surprising.
03:04 But what is surprising is what remains in the left-hand corner, right where the plushies sat.
03:10 You'll find a chair, turned to face the corner, and a sequence of tally marks carved into the wall.
03:14 And these aren't just random markings, either.
03:16 They're specifically in groups of twos, fours, and fives.
03:20 And they're grouped in such a way to suggest words, or, at the very least, separate letters.
03:24 Now, that alone would be weird, but an even bigger, clearer display of tally marks appears again about an hour later into the game.
03:31 After completing Bonnie Bowl, you enter Bonnie's green room behind the bowling alley.
03:34 Not only does this area show us the, um, special relationship that existed between Freddy and Bonnie,
03:39 if you put on the Banny mask, on the wall over top of the pin-loading staff bot is another code.
03:44 Much larger and much more organized than the one that we just saw before.
03:48 And once again, all the tally marks here are specifically grouped into twos, fours, and fives.
03:53 No ones or threes in sight.
03:54 They are obviously meant to be connected.
03:56 They are obviously trying to tell us something, but we are obviously not getting the message.
04:00 So, what can we do?
04:01 Well, the first answer is to try a substitution cipher.
04:04 Tally up the numbers and swap in the appropriate letters.
04:06 Notice, though, that the tally marks are weirdly spaced out,
04:09 which led a bunch of us to believe that we're supposed to be using those spaces to define each letter,
04:13 adding up the numbers that aren't separated by the space.
04:15 So, the top line there is gonna be four, then a space, then five, four, four, which would add up to thirteen.
04:20 It's a pretty darn self-explanatory system here.
04:22 Doing that for the whole thing gives us a code of...
04:24 *Gasp*
04:25 Four, thirteen, six, nineteen, four, seventeen, seven, four, sixteen, ten, eight, seven, twenty-seven, nineteen.
04:31 Which, if you do a standard number-to-letter conversion, gives you this.
04:34 D-M-F-S-D-Q-G...
04:38 Yeah.
04:38 You know what? I'm just gonna leave it there.
04:40 Clearly, this isn't working.
04:41 It's just a bunch of random letters.
04:43 You'll also notice that there's a twenty-seven in that number mix,
04:46 which should have been our first red flag,
04:48 considering that, you know, there's only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet.
04:51 But Reddit user tgirlunara wasn't deterred.
04:54 'Cause the alphabet doesn't have twenty-seven letters,
04:56 they instead took it a step further and tried the whole thing as a shift cipher.
05:00 A shift cipher is similar to a Caesar cipher,
05:02 but instead of the numbers converting into standard letters, like A1, B2, C3, etc.,
05:06 you instead mix up or shift the order in some way.
05:09 So now, for instance, A is seven, B is eight, C is nine, and so on.
05:13 Normally, in a Caesar cipher, the alphabet then loops back around,
05:16 so if A was seven, Z would then equal six,
05:19 but in a shift cipher, that doesn't happen.
05:21 The numbers just carry on as is.
05:22 So in this case, if A equals seven, then Z would equal thirty-two.
05:26 For this particular instance, tgirlunara put A equaling four,
05:30 which meant that twenty-seven was now X,
05:32 and gave us the entire code of...
05:34 "Ajka Pan Damaged XP".
05:36 Not a lot of lore significance with that one.
05:38 But I did want to continue down that path,
05:40 so we tried hundreds of different shift and Caesar ciphers.
05:44 They all came out as absolute gibberish.
05:47 We also tried just unscrambling the words.
05:49 Maybe there was another arrangement in there that would give us a more cohesive answer,
05:51 but yet again, more gibberish.
05:53 Another solution was presented by user SmartFellaFartSmella.
05:57 Great name there.
05:58 We also tried adding up the numbers,
06:00 but this time, they didn't do it by adding up the numbers in each group,
06:02 but instead the numbers in each column.
06:04 Again, notice the odd spacing of all these tally marks.
06:07 It can't be a coincidence, right?
06:09 The first column contains a four and a five, so that would be nine.
06:11 The second is just the two, next up is five, so on and so forth down the line.
06:15 Ending up with this code.
06:16 *gasp*
06:17 9, 2, 5, 9, 13, 7, 10, 8, 21, 16, 20, 14, 17, 8, 2, 5, 4, 4.
06:25 This felt promising to me,
06:26 because unlike last time, we only had numbers that fell within the alphabet.
06:30 So converting all of these numbers into letters, we got ourselves the following.
06:33 "I B M G J O O P T K N K B E D"
06:36 We once again went through with all the classic Caesar ciphers and word unscramblers and all that stuff,
06:41 but once again, wound up with nothing.
06:43 Back to the drawing board for the third time.
06:45 An anonymous poster uploaded this onto Imgur,
06:48 and the same point was later brought to my attention by Reddit user NoRate.
06:51 Basically, what they pointed out was that the tally marks in the corner of Baby's room make a 5x5 grid.
06:56 A grid that, when rotated or flipped, can map perfectly onto the tally code that we see on the wall of Bonnie Bowl.
07:01 NoRate actually took this information and pointed out the fact that the main grid arrangement
07:05 seems to line up with something known as a Polybius Cipher,
07:08 which uses a 5x5 grid of letters to scramble or unscramble codes.
07:12 Basically, a number code like 53 would mean that you go along the top to 5,
07:15 and then down 3, and boom, that right there is the letter for your phrase.
07:18 And while it certainly seems promising at first, sadly, the method also came up short.
07:22 With only 2s, 4s, and 5s as the tally marks,
07:24 the grid wasn't really giving us any information that we could use to decode anything.
07:29 We needed an entire alphabet in here, not just a few random tally marks.
07:32 The same held true for another famous 5x5 grid cipher, the Playfair Cipher,
07:37 which requires a code word to use.
07:39 What could that code word be? Who knows.
07:41 Did it feel like we were actually starting to make some level of progress here?
07:44 Yes, absolutely.
07:45 But did any of it yield us any results? No.
07:48 But here's where things get really interesting.
07:50 This isn't the first time FNAF has stumped us with tally marks.
07:53 Rewind backwards 6 years, my friends, to the release of the Freddy Fazbear Security Logbook,
07:59 home to my two oldest and greatest nemeses, the Foxy Grid and the Dabbing Chica.
08:04 *Foxy's horn*
08:05 For those of you who haven't been a part of the community for that long,
08:07 let me quickly tell you that this seemingly innocent children's workbook was pivotal for decoding FNAF 4,
08:13 for giving us the name of Cassidy,
08:14 for frustrating us to no end with seemingly unsolvable number puzzles.
08:18 The most notorious of them all was the Foxy Grid,
08:21 a numeric grid with a hidden alphabet written into its squares,
08:24 a grid that we still haven't figured out the use of to this very day.
08:28 You ever read Moby Dick?
08:29 At least are you familiar with the story about how Captain Ahab's obsessed with killing this giant white whale?
08:33 This right here, this Foxy Grid, that is my white whale.
08:37 This thing haunts my nightmares.
08:39 This grid keeps me up at night,
08:40 which honestly are two very contradictory effects of this one grid on my sleep habits,
08:44 but that is how infuriating this thing is.
08:47 I am convinced that this grid will eventually give us the name of the crying child.
08:51 I just don't know how yet.
08:52 Anyway, one of the other clues that never really got a proper use out of this thing
08:55 were a series of tally marks that were found throughout the book.
08:58 The fact that they're in red pen tells us that they were written by Mike.
09:01 Other than that, we don't really know anything about what they were trying to say to us,
09:04 and so they've lingered on in the back of my brain for over half a decade.
09:09 Why am I bringing them up now?
09:10 Well, I wondered if there was a possible connection between these two sets of tally marks.
09:13 You know, besides them just being tally marks.
09:15 Guess what I found?
09:16 Groups of fours and fives only.
09:19 Yet again, we find ourselves with a collection of tally marks carrying over the same specific sets of numbers.
09:25 Are they connected, or is this just a random coincidence?
09:27 Not really sure.
09:28 But the fact that tally marks keep getting brought up and also keep stumping us,
09:32 that's just a wee bit infuriating.
09:34 And yet the games still aren't done with this puzzle.
09:37 You see, the tally marks are connected to yet another part of the franchise, Security Breach.
09:41 Back during my playthrough of the original Security Breach,
09:43 this room in the daycare section really caught my attention.
09:46 I'm noticing that two, four, and five are different, which is weird.
09:49 As someone who has dealt with a lot of codes and ARGs and things,
09:54 that feels suspi- I agree.
09:55 Two, four, and five.
09:58 Two years before Ruin, some element, some essence of this tally code was still kicking around.
10:03 But now, the numbers were being matched with colors.
10:06 And so, Reddit user ComfortableMap7594 took those tally marks and used these colors to create a sort of paint-by-numbers graphic,
10:13 which I absolutely adore as a possible solution,
10:15 though I absolutely hate the fact that it didn't seem to produce anything.
10:19 Let me know down in the comments.
10:20 Do you see anything here?
10:21 Because to me, all I'm seeing here is me getting depressed.
10:24 So maybe we just take a break from trying to decode these things,
10:26 and instead take a minute to look at the world around these tallies to get a sense of who might be speaking here.
10:31 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.
10:36 But what about in Ruin?
10:37 Well, in the baby plush room, we have, obviously enough, Baby.
10:41 Not that shocking.
10:42 But what's especially important to note here is that they're not all Baby.
10:45 See, half the plushies are normal Baby, and the other half are scrap Baby.
10:49 What's the big difference?
10:50 Well, besides the obvious scrap metal plates on their bodies, there's one thing that alternates depending on the version.
10:55 Something that's been important to Baby since the very beginning.
10:58 Her eye color.
10:59 The regular Baby plushies have blue eyes, while scrap Baby has green eyes,
11:03 showing the two sides of Baby before and after Elizabeth's death and possession.
11:07 But Reddit user Dylan Hippiejink took it one step further.
11:10 They noticed that the eyes of the Baby and scrap Baby plushies were scratched out,
11:13 leaving just the blue right eye from Baby and the green left eye for scrap Baby.
11:18 That right there?
11:19 That is a compelling detail, because it directly matches up to the evil entity that we've been battling against throughout the entire game,
11:25 the Mimic.
11:26 You see, in the story Tiger Rock, the Mimic AI program takes the form of the digital entity Tiger Rock,
11:31 a tiger animatronic with a green left eye and a blue right eye.
11:34 Is this confirming for us that the Mimic AI and Baby are somehow one and the same?
11:39 Or maybe that the Mimic has two souls, or entities that it learned from,
11:43 just like how Baby in the books is two children in one, Elizabeth and Charlie.
11:46 Not really sure, but that right there?
11:48 That is a massive revelation that feels super important to solving the mystery.
11:52 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.
11:58 It is still a very cool, compelling connection that I'm not willing to fully discount yet.
12:02 It's just not as consistent as I would have liked, as far as evidence goes.
12:06 The chair, meanwhile, looks like a disciplinary measure.
12:08 A bad child that was put into timeout,
12:10 forced to face into a corner and scratching away at the wall to count the hours or days out of boredom.
12:15 Since this is a room full of ghostly Baby plushies, it stands to reason that the punished child here could have been Elizabeth.
12:21 Obviously not physically here in this room of the Pizza Plex,
12:24 but with this scene recreating a recurring moment from her past in some ghostly, spectral way.
12:29 We know Afton wasn't really the greatest dad to her.
12:32 Maybe this right here? It's a glimpse of his parenting style.
12:34 As for the tally marks in Bonnie's green room, the font is the same, so they were likely carved by the same person.
12:40 But honestly, that's where the similarities end.
12:42 These marks appear in AR land, as opposed to Baby's, which are in the real world.
12:46 This implies that whoever made Bonnie's marks either had the Banny mask at some point,
12:50 or is connected to the digital network that's running the Pizza Plex.
12:52 Bonnie's marks are also higher up on the wall, as opposed to Baby's, which are at floor level, easily reachable by a small child.
12:59 So then, why these two rooms specifically?
13:01 Well, a few things come to mind.
13:03 If Baby is, in fact, connected in some way to the Mimic, and/or the neural network that runs the Pizza Plex,
13:08 we can guess that Bonnie is too.
13:09 When we deactivate the wet floor bots around the Pizza Plex, we also end up deactivating Bonnie.
13:14 So that connection into the wider Pizza Plex interface may be important here.
13:18 We also know that both Baby and Bonnie are "missing" from the Pizza Plex.
13:23 Baby isn't supposed to be here, according to that AR description.
13:26 And Bonnie was decommissioned from the complex.
13:29 Again, they're obviously loose threads, but in a puzzle with no clear answer,
13:32 that somehow connects two very random, historically unrelated characters like Bonnie and Baby,
13:37 every small detail here is absolutely worth considering.
13:40 But that's more than enough talk about telemarks.
13:42 Let me remind you of yet another numerical code that was just blatantly given to us by the devs,
13:47 that us, as a community, have been largely unable to solve.
13:49 Remember those Mylar balloons that I was just freaking out about in Superstar Daycare?
13:53 Well, they have themselves yet another appearance right here,
13:56 on the eighth hole of Security Breach's Monty Gator Golf arcade cabinet.
14:00 On this Balloon Boy-themed hole, we get this.
14:03 "3192. That's suspicious."
14:05 A handful of numbered balloons.
14:07 In reality, the number sequence is actually a lot longer.
14:10 "6369553192."
14:13 The fact that these are in Monty Gator Golf immediately made me wonder whether this code was the score they had to get in the game.
14:18 Except there are ten numbers and only nine holes.
14:21 But when has simple math ever stopped the internet?
14:24 User "00Core00" tried a number of different combinations to see whether they could activate anything.
14:29 Sadly, nothing.
14:30 Then Ruin released with a new Monty Gator Golf arcade cabinet,
14:33 and so people like "Yusuf0808" tried again using this exact same code,
14:37 and still wound up with nothing.
14:39 Here's the thing though.
14:40 Both of these games have been datamined to heckin' back.
14:43 If this code was meant to unlock something inside of Monty Gator Golf,
14:45 we'd have heard about it already.
14:47 Which leads me to believe that it's something actually outside of the game.
14:50 Much like I suspected with the tally marks,
14:52 it's not about activating some hidden ending,
14:54 it's about giving us a code.
14:56 A cipher.
14:56 A phrase that'll tell us something about the wider world.
14:59 We just haven't figured out how to use it yet.
15:01 I've tried converting the letters, ciphers, you name it,
15:04 I just keep coming up empty-handed.
15:05 One of our writers even suggested trying hex codes to see if there might be something there.
15:09 At first it looked positive.
15:10 The last six numbers actually produce a purple that matches the Aftons that we know and love so much.
15:15 But it's not an exact match, nor does the first half of the numbers amount to anything meaningful.
15:20 Maybe the fact that these are Mylar balloons connected to the multicolored Mylar balloons in the daycare,
15:24 which then also connects them back to the tally mark puzzle?
15:27 Or maybe I'm just desperately looking for answers where there are no answers to be had.
15:31 Now, for all of these lingering puzzles, I was able to find at least a couple of people discussing them online.
15:35 In discords, forums, reddit posts, what have you.
15:38 But for this last one, nothing.
15:40 Or, at least practically nothing.
15:41 I could find only two posts total.
15:43 Which is exactly why I wanted to raise some awareness about it here,
15:46 'cause to me, this seems like a massive clue that largely got overlooked during the wave of reveals that happened throughout Ruin.
15:52 Early on in the game, we have a chance to revisit the daycare attendance room.
15:56 This room is nothing new to a FNAF theorist.
15:58 It was the one that we were able to unlock in Security Breach by photographing random characters throughout the game world.
16:02 Inside of it, we were able to find the glitchy Balloon World arcade cabinet,
16:06 a lost relic to a seemingly incomplete path inside the game.
16:09 So when the room showed up again in Ruin, I wanted to pay extra attention.
16:12 On the surface, the room seems largely the same, just a bit messier than before.
16:16 Boxes of stuff, clothing hanging from the wall, some post-it notes scattered around.
16:20 But then, by putting on the Vanny mask, everything resets to normal.
16:23 The room basically goes back to the way that it was.
16:25 Cleaner, more organized.
16:27 Nothing all that noteworthy.
16:28 Until, of course, you start talking about the notes.
16:31 Those are worthy.
16:33 All of a sudden, on a blank wall, we get ourselves a 3x3 grid of post-it notes.
16:37 What is it with Steel Wool games and post-it note lore?
16:40 I mean, if I had a nickel for every time Steel Wool used post-it notes to hint at lore, I'd have...
16:44 ...two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
16:47 The nine post-its that we're dealing with are as follows.
16:49 One that says "Groceries" with "Butter" written three times.
16:52 There's a collection of dots, a scribble, footprints, hearts and pizza,
16:56 lightning bolt, sun and hill, stars and a microphone, and a selection of candy.
17:00 As usual, my first thought was to jump into a cipher.
17:02 Immediately, you see how some of these post-its can relate to numbers.
17:04 We have two feet, four stars, seven dots, three butters, three lightning bolts.
17:09 Felt like a really solid place to start, but obviously it wasn't gonna be perfect.
17:13 We have a pizza post-it, but are we counting the two slices of pizza, the four hearts, or both?
17:17 What about that squiggle? What's that stand for? Nothing?
17:20 How about the hill in the sun?
17:21 Is this meant to be FNAF 6's graveyard hill, so maybe we're counting gravestones?
17:24 Or is this more likely counting the number of rays coming off the sun?
17:28 Overall, converting the post-its to numbers wasn't really given the cleanest solutions,
17:32 but it did feel like a step in the right direction.
17:34 From there, when you look up how to solve 3x3 ciphers,
17:37 the number one solution that pops up is the hill cipher.
17:40 Now, when it comes to codes, a hill cipher is pretty darn complex,
17:43 but overall, the key to deciphering one is a matrix, a table of numbers.
17:46 And if you're using the English alphabet with its 26 letters,
17:49 you're gonna need yourself a 3x3 matrix.
17:52 Or, let's just say, a 3x3 grid of post-it notes.
17:55 The numbers in the matrix represent the shifts that you're gonna have to apply to each letter of the alphabet.
17:59 To encode a message using a hill cipher, you first convert the message into numbers.
18:02 You can do this by assigning each letter of the alphabet a number from 0 to 25.
18:06 For instance, A would be 0, B would be 1, and so on.
18:09 Next, you multiply each letter of the message by the corresponding matrix.
18:12 For example, if the first letter of your message is A, you would multiply it by the first row of the matrix.
18:17 If the second letter of the message is B, you would multiply it by the second row of the matrix.
18:21 The result is a new number which you can then convert back into a letter, giving you the encoded message.
18:26 To decode, you just do the same in reverse.
18:28 For instance, if I had this message, "Hello, how are you?"
18:30 With this matrix, 321110201, my encoded message would look a little something like this.
18:36 *typing*
18:37 I'm not even gonna try.
18:38 Like I said, it's a pretty complex way of encoding something, but let's be honest with ourselves,
18:42 when has FNAF ever not been complex?
18:44 And after the wall code from Security Breach got broken in a day,
18:46 Steel Wool was probably looking for some that's a bit harder, some with a bit more lasting power.
18:51 So really, a hill cipher seems to fit this new wall code nicely.
18:54 There's just one problem.
18:56 What exactly are we decoding?
18:57 Sure, we have ourselves a rough matrix, but where's the number or letter sequence that we're trying to put through it?
19:02 The balloons? The tally marks?
19:04 I ran them both through a few variations of my own matrix.
19:06 3 for butters, 7 for dots, 2 for footprints, 4 hearts, etc, etc.
19:10 But ultimately, I wound up with nothing to show for the whole thing.
19:12 Again, it felt like we were getting close to a methodology, but I was just missing some crucial step in the process.
19:18 So I tried a completely different approach.
19:20 Rather than ciphers, did this collection of images mean something to me?
19:24 The candy, to me, looked very similar to the drawings that we saw in the original post-it room from Security Breach.
19:29 Same goes with the pizzas.
19:30 The lightning bolts are designed similarly to the charging stations found throughout the pizzaplex,
19:34 as well as the bolt of lightning on Glamrock Freddy's chest.
19:36 Notice the flat tops on the lightning bolts, which makes them distinctly different from other lightning bolts
19:41 that we've seen across the series, like the controlled shock button from Sister Location.
19:45 The microphone and stars reminds me of Freddy and the Gang.
19:47 This group of 7 dots? Certainly vague, but the number 7 has shown up before in both FNAF, VR, and the post-it room in Security Breach.
19:53 Usually, it represents the 7 victims.
19:55 5 missing children, Charlie, and the crying child.
19:58 7 dots, 7 graves.
20:00 You've got the hill in the sun, which is reminiscent of the hill during the Afton and Princess Quest endings,
20:05 and the butters were obvious references to Sister Location's exotic butters.
20:09 *gibberish*
20:10 EXOTIC BUTTERS
20:11 Overall, all the post-its seem to relate, in at least a small tangential way, to Michael Afton.
20:16 Man, he really is becoming like his dad.
20:18 Always coming back to our theories.
20:21 Reddit user PikminKingX posted about these 9 drawings and drew all of them back to 2 very important games,
20:27 Sister Location and Pizzeria Simulator.
20:29 Two games where we, for sure, play as Michael Afton.
20:32 First, you got the candy that we spoke about.
20:33 Well, in Pizzeria Simulator, candy's all over the place.
20:36 In advertisements from Lally's Lollies, gumball machines we can buy for the franchise,
20:40 but the most important one of all, of course, is Candy Cadet, who actually winds up back in ruin.
20:45 The lightning bolts also relate back to FNAF 6, as they're identical to the power-up that you collect in the Fruity Maze minigame.
20:51 Or, like I said, they can relate to the lightning bolt on Glamrock Freddy's chest,
20:55 an animatronic who many have theorized, myself included, has the soul of Michael Afton inside it.
21:00 The stars and microphone call back to the four main rockstar animatronics.
21:04 Freddy, who holds the microphone, along with Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy.
21:07 The Sunny Hill, well, that's the iconic FNAF 6 gravestone ending,
21:10 with all five of the missing children, plus Charlie, put to rest on the hill.
21:13 Along with that, he'd be familiar with the seventh victim, his younger brother, the crying child,
21:18 so if that's what these seven dots represent, he'd understand that symbolism.
21:21 Mike also has a strong love of pizza, as in the security logbook,
21:25 he literally says it's the only reason to apply for the job,
21:28 with hearts on the other pages that look similar to the ones that are on the post-its over here.
21:32 Then there's the footprints.
21:33 In true classic FNAF theory fashion, Pikmin King X points out that these are three-toed footprints,
21:39 and they're almost identical to the ones that we see in the other FNAF 6 minigame, Midnight Motorist,
21:44 where there are two three-toed footprints outside of a broken window,
21:47 where Michael's either the escapee who broke out of that window,
21:50 or the one sitting on the couch watching TV.
21:53 The only thing unaccounted for here are the squiggly lines,
21:56 but to me, that could just represent Ennard, or the Tangle,
21:58 or whatever robot spaghetti this franchise wants to throw at the wall at this point.
22:02 Could this mean that Michael might in fact be alive?
22:04 That he's living inside the Pizzaplex trying to finish the job that he started?
22:07 Maybe that's the entire reason the sister location room exists in the Pizzaplex in the first place.
22:11 Maybe it's him talking to the recreation of his younger brother.
22:14 Maybe he learned the language of the mimic that his father used to communicate with the monster that killed his sister,
22:19 like we predicted in a previous theory.
22:20 All signs here point to Michael, or not.
22:24 Let me be perfectly clear.
22:25 This is broad speculation based on a piece of evidence that has clearly not been solved yet.
22:30 And honestly, that's why I need your help.
22:31 You've seen all the theory threads that I've been pulling,
22:33 all the ciphers and interpretations that I've tried here,
22:36 and we're still none the wiser.
22:37 There are solutions out there for all of these puzzles.
22:40 I am almost sure of that.
22:42 But I need the collective hive mind of the FNAF community behind me to pitch out some solutions.
22:46 The theorists of Reddit I called out today have done an amazing job getting the ball rolling.
22:50 And I do truly believe that with a bit more time and a bit more focus,
22:53 together we can solve these mysteries.
22:55 Last time I did a theory like this, it was five years ago.
22:58 About 48 hours later, you all had collectively discovered the name "Cassidy" hidden inside the security logbook.
23:03 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.
23:09 Let's try to do that again here.
23:10 One or all of these puzzles are gonna lead to some sort of massive revelation.
23:15 So I'm leaving a link down below to the Game Theorists subreddit where I'd encourage you to write up your theories.
23:19 I'm also dropping in some links to decoding websites that'll help make the grind a bit easier,
23:23 especially for all those grid-based puzzles.
23:25 I'm gonna be keeping a close eye on all of this for the next couple of weeks.
23:28 It'd be cool if we could manage to solve one of these things before the year's end.
23:32 Who knows? Maybe Help Wanted 2 will drop and solve everything for us,
23:35 leaving the lore crystal clear with no further questions and no ciphers required.
23:39 *laughs*
23:40 Yeah, okay, sure. I'm sure that's absolutely gonna happen with this franchise.
23:44 Until that day comes, friends, remember, it's all just a theory.
23:48 A GAME THEORY!
23:50 Thanks for watching.