Harry 
title
MatPat’s final stream was last Saturday.
It was beautiful and emotional. This man who meant so much to us, who we looked up
to, who even in his final stteam dedicated to celebrating his legacy was so generous and
raised over 230,000 dollars for charity – what better way to honor his memory than by dragging
his very first fnaf theory through the mud?
Nahh, I’m kidding
But we are going to be looking critically at the date that he and other
theorists have proposed for when fnaf 1 takes place using FACTS and LOGIC and SPREADSHEETS.
And we’re going to examine some completely new evidence I doubt you’ve ever heard before AND old
evidence from angles you’ve never thought of.
Why? Certainly not once again because of
evidence in your favorite book, The Week Before, right Candi? Right Candi?
Oh boy not again
I can’t help it! I love this book! And it’s
so full of lore, but don’t worry we’re not going to spend the whole video in The Week
Before.
We’re going to examine other riveting sources like spreadsheets and the social
security administration websites Ooooo
I’m Candi Buunny and welcome
to The Most In Depth Guide You’ll Ever Need for when Fnaf 1 takes place.
Why do we care? I don’t know: you clicked on the video. You tell me. Just kidding! It’s because
Fnaf 1 is THE original that we all fell in love with. It’s the reason why we keep happily
giving Scott Cawthon our money and watching more theory videos than is good for any well-adjusted
individual. And from the beginning we’ve tried to scrutinize when it takes place. And ten years
later we’re still no closer to a consensus on the answer and at this point it’s grown from a gnawing
curiosity to an all consuming obsession. How can we have sat with this game for a decade and still
the only answer we can agree on for when it takes place is “idk sometime after fnaf 2?”
1989, 1992, 93, 94, 2003?
Let’s rip every piece of evidence we have to
SHREDS and find out which is more likely.
Before we begin: an announcement: Eastybeastyy in
my comments had the genius idea that my followers should be called the Cadets because I got that
whole Candy Candy Candi routine going on and I’m in LOVE with the idea.
So… congratulations
Cadets on your official promotion.
Fnaf 1
Fnaf 1 takes place after Fnaf 2 and before Fnaf 3. Fnaf 2 takes place in 1987 because our
check is dated, and Fnaf 3 takes place in… uh yeah haha that’s much more unclear,
but at least Fnaf 2 was useful.
There are three pieces of evidence in Fnaf
1 itself to help us deduce the date. MatPat, may he enjoy his retirement, pointed out
all three in his first ever fnaf theory
#1 Five Nights at Freddy’s is a Chuck E
Cheese analogue with the pizza and the children’s entertainment and the animatronic
performers. Chuck E Cheese was founded in 1977, had its heyday in the late 80s through the
90s, and is still in business today. The newspaper clippings that can appear
on the wall give us the impression that Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was quite popular
before several children went missing, lured away by someone dressed in a company mascot.
The newspapers describe them as “much loved animal mascots,” and that they’re having trouble
getting families to come back after the tragedy, which implies to me that many families and
children used to love this place.
So perhaps this takes place around the heyday of
Chuck E Cheese, late 80’s or 90’s.
#2 “If I were forced to sing… those same
stupid songs for 20 years, and I never got a bath? I’d probably be a bit irritable at night
too.” The Phone Guy says the animatronics have been around for 20 years. Chuck E Cheese was
founded in 1977. 20 years later would be 1997, which is towards the end of the glory
days of Charles Entertainment Cheese.
#3 The Paycheck. Mike Schmidt takes home $120.00
for his 30 hour workweek. Matpat used minimum wage to try to narrow down the reasonable dates
because Fazbear Entertainment is ABSOLUTELY a company that pays its employees minimum wage.
In 1997, the federal minimum wage was at $5.15. 30 hours a week would net you $154.50 per
paycheck. That’s a little high, but Social Security and Medicare come out of your paycheck
before you receive it.
Taking out that much, you’d be left with $142.68. Too high still.
But at this point in the franchise, we have no idea when Fazbear is founded. It doesn’t HAVE to
be the same year as Chuck E Cheese, and Phone Guy could be rounding when he says 20 years anyway.
The real sweet spot for the federal minimum wage is 1991-1995, when minimum wage was at $4.25,
which nets you $127.50 with no deductions, or $117.75 after deductions with honorary mention
to 1990 when the numbers are just a bit lower.
Pause. This was the first Fnaf game.
Scott had
no idea at this point how crazy popular this game was going to be or that the fan community
would become obsessed with trying to uncover every mystery and over analyze every bit of
subtext. It’s hard to know how much thought went into each decision of this game.
Making a video game is a form of art, and even if Scott didn’t know that he was going
assume the role of storyteller and puzzle master for 15 other games, he certainly put care and
attention into this game. If I was making a game, I’d absolutely try to make a realistic paycheck by
looking up minimum wage for the year I had in mind because I’m a numbers person and including that
detail would be satisfying for me. But I don’t know if that’s the case for Scott as an artist. I
think there are three possibilities for how Scott approached coming up with this number:
The first is what I just said – he looked up minimum wage for the year or
range of years he had in mind.
The second is he just sorta eyeballed it
and picked a number that felt reasonable.
The third is he worked a minimum wage job himself
around this time period and thought something like “Ah I remember my first job flipping burgers
at… Whataburger.
I was so excited to take home my first paycheck… I think it was around $120”
Let’s zoom in on the third option because we’re being as thorough as possible with this video.
Scott was born in June 1978. In the US, some places will let you work as young as 14. It’s
likely Scott worked some minimum wage job between 14-19, though his Wikipedia article says nothing
about past jobs. Scott was 14-19 in 1990-1997, which is around the years we’re looking at.
Now the reason why minimum wage increased in 1996 and made the numbers too big to fit the
paycheck in fnaf 1 was because of something called the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was
made in 1938, It established the federal minimum wage and other things like time and a half pay and
not employing minors in oppressive child labor.
In 1996 some big amendments were made that increased
the minimum wage over the next two years so that it would hit $5.15 by 1997. However, it also
instituted something called Youth Minimum Wage, which said that an employer could pay employees
under the age of 20 $4.25 an hour for the first 90 days of their employment and after that
they’d have to pay them the federal standard.
If Scott did pick the paycheck number fondly
remembering his first paychecks at his minimum wage job, this actually expands our reasonable
dates to include 1996, 97, and 98, because Scott would’ve been 19 until June of 1998.
I should also point out that Scott is from Texas.
Minimum wage at a job always must be
the larger between federal, state, and municipal minimum wage, and Texas is not above the federal
minimum wage for any of these dates, so we don’t need to look at a Texas-specific calculation.
Is it more likely that Scott looked up minimum wage or just picked a number or based it off
of his real-life experience? “the world may never know”
Fnaf 2
Following shortly after the wild success of Fnaf
1, Fnaf 2 also has three new pieces of information we can use to help determine the date of its
predecessor, and they all occur on this paycheck.
Once again, we get paid at the end of night
5, having worked a 30 hour workweek.
Jeremy Fitzgerald made $100.50 on November 12, 1987.
Ohh there’s more to glean from this paycheck than you’re expecting. Let’s do the two obvious first.
Firstly. Fnaf 2 is a prequel. We find out that the animatronics are allowed to walk around freely
during the day at this location. In Fnaf 1, Phone Guy says the animatronics USED TO walk
around until the bite of 87 happens.
So the bite hasn’t yet happened in Fnaf 2 but it will before
Fnaf 1. This paycheck is dated 1987, which means Fnaf 1 takes place after 1987. Our minimum
wage sweet spot was later than that already, but it’s a nice nod in the right direction.
Second, having the full date November 12, 1987 means Fazbear pays out the weekly paycheck on
Thursday. Once again we need to ask, is Scott the kind of artist who would take into account that
companies usually are consistent between locations and years about what day of the week they issue
paychecks on? If so, we can narrow down our dates very considerably because the Fnaf 1 paycheck is
also dated for November 12. Our prospective years would then be narrowed down to 1992 and 1998.
Thirdly, and I haven’t heard this mentioned before and am very excited about it. The Fnaf 2 paycheck
is exactly $100.50. Why the 50 cents? It’s because this is the EXACT minimum wage calculation for 30
hours in 1987 with no deductions.
$3.35 an hour for 30 hours – $100.50. This definitely tells
me something about Scott and his relationship with the paycheck calculations – he cared
enough to look up the minimum wage but not enough to consider paycheck deductions.
What does this mean for Fnaf 1? Well in Fnaf 1 we got paid exactly $120 for 30 hours of work.
At no year does the federal minimum wage work out exactly to $120. It’s just close at $127.50 from
1991-1995. Mike actually made $4/hour instead of $4.25. Now like I said before, minimum wage is
always the highest between federal and state, which means it’s possible Scott looked up
a specific state’s minimum wage.
If so, it would have to be a specific state before
1991, otherwise it would be superseded by the higher federal rate of $4.25. SPREADSHEET TIME.
The minimum wage by state was not $4 in any state in these years. In fact, I don’t think it was $4
in any state in any year because everyone made a jump from three-thirty something to 4.25 in 1991.
This leads me to believe that Scott likely either picked a number that felt reasonable to him for
the fnaf 1 paycheck OR tried to remember one of his own paychecks from around the same time WHICH
MEANS we should probably be decently generous with our paycheck math.
If we reaaally think fnaf
1 takes place in like 2020 but the paychecks don’t line up, we might have to just shrug and
accept the headcannon that Fazbear was illegally underpaying their employees.
On to fnaf 3
uhhh… yeah okay we’ll get back to you buddy
How about Fnaf 4 and Sister Location? One important piece of information we put
together between these two games is who the player of fnaf 1 was. Mike Schmidt is
really Mike Afton, the son of the purple guy, the Foxy bro.
Does knowing the recipient of
the Fnaf 1 paycheck change anything for us?
Well, it could. Like I said before, the Fair
Labor Standards Act Amendments of 1996 instituted a youth pay rate for people under 20.
Do we think Scott took into account the age of the security guard in fnaf 1
AND the Fair Labor Standards Act when he didn’t even calculate social security
withholdings for the fnaf 2 paycheck? No.
Will I take it into account while
making this video? Absolutely I love spreadsheets and I promised this
would be the most comprehensive guide you’ll ever need for when fnaf 1 takes place.
Besides, let’s be real, some things in the early fnaf games were not planned and don’t make a
ton of sense. And we as the community have a field day trying to make them make sense anyway.
So, even if Scott didn’t intend it, we can still have fun figuring out if Fazbear was illegally
paying Mike under the federal minimum wage.
Now our range of years of interest for fnaf 1 are
1987 all the way through 2014 when the game came out.
How old would Mike be during those years?
We see Mike in 1983 in the fnaf 4 between night minigames. In these minigames, there are
short kids and tall kids. Mike is among the tall kids. I take this to mean Mike
has hit his middle school growth spurt, which normally hits between ages 12-15 for boys.
We can add a year earlier for comfort in case he grew early. How many years should we add to the
other end? How old would a kid realistically be running around wearing a foxy mask and jumpscaring
his kid brother? Even adding one year and making it 16 feels pretty old for that, but Mike does
come from an extremely dysfunctional household and that can mess with hitting developmental
and maturity benchmarks, so I’ll say Mike could be between 11-17 in 1983.
That said, I
find it most likely that Mike is 12 or 13.
Mike is then born between 1966-1972,
with 1970 being the most likely year.
At the absolute youngest, Mike is born
in 1972 and hits 20 years old in 1992, which means he would never have been eligible for
youth pay because it didn’t start until 1996.
We actually don’t have that much evidence in
subsequent games, but we do eventually get the Faz tokens that tell us that Fazbear’s was founded
in 1983. This could recontextualize Phone Guy’s line “for 20 years and I never got a bath.” 20
years after 1983 is 2003, which is much later than we have looked at so far. Minimum wage from
1997-2006 is $5.15, which puts the paycheck at $154.50. That’s a little high but we JUST said
we have leeway to fudge that paycheck number.
RyeToast has been theorizing that fallfest was
the birthplace of many of the beloved Fazbear characters.
If this is the case, the earliest date
we have for Fallfest is 1970, so if it’s confirmed in Secret of the Mimic that some of the characters
are older than Fazbear’s, Phone Guy’s line could make sense with a date as early as 1990.
We also find out through the novel trilogy and the lawsuit in Pizzeria Simulator that fnaf
takes place in Utah, so we’ve got a bunch of new minimum wage numbers to check… oh wait no we don’t
because they’re all under the federal minimum, at least up until 2014 when fnaf 1 came out.
Oh my goodness… is it time for my absolute favorite fnaf book to take center stage? Oh
hey, what are you doing here Security Logbook?
The Security Logbook is tied with The Week Before
for the most lore-dense book.
This baby is PACKED, and it’s fun, and I’ve been obsessing over one of
its pages for many days now. Let’s get into it.
This book belongs to Mike. That’s
Mike Schmidt/Afton, the protagonist of all of the mainline games of the first arch except
probably Fnaf World and Ultimate Custom Night
This is a book produced by the Fazbear Frights
company that ran the horror attraction of Fnaf 3. How do I know? Without going too in-depth it’s
because this book doesn’t break character of being in universe, except of course the copyright
page. There are ghosts having a lovely chitchat in the book, so that sure seems in Universe. It
references Springlock suits, which we know were retired by the company before the MCI in 1985,
so the book could take place before 1985.
Except Chica has Macbook-knockoff and also there’s an
image of her dabbing, which was a 2015 trend.
So if it’s far after springlock suits yet
knows about them, then it’s published by the company that found the vintage audio
training cassettes about springlock suits, Fazbear Frights, the horror experience company.
Throughout the book, Mike writes in red pen and makes little doodles. He’s a pretty good artist
tbh. If he wasn’t a horrifying shell of a man all-consumed by his purpose to stop his father and
save those with soul, he probably could’ve made it as an artist.
He’s even got the trauma for it.
Anyways. The book also has these vintage coupons that are a dollar amount off of some Fazbear
package like $8 off the Perfect Pizza Pack or $4 off Chica’s Cupcake Chaos. Each section is
labeled something fun that’s also a pun on how dangerous Freddy’s is like “Take a BITE… out of
fun on your next birthday!” or “Slice… up some family fun at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza” and they
range from $4 to $8… except for the last bunch of coupons which are for much more $12-16.
The reason
why can be deduced by the title: “Grand Reopening! Join us at the new Freddy Fazber’s Pizza!”
All the other coupons were for the original MCI location, which we will later learn
featured the same classic animatronic designs as the Fnaf 1 location. But the last
bunch of coupons is specifically for the Fnaf 1 reopening of that location. The prices
are higher not just to adjust for inflation but also to entice people to come despite
the now prevalent rumors about the company.
The final coupon is for $16 and Mike has written
in red pen “For real value, see page 61.”
Flipping to page 61, we find comic panels that
we’re meant to finish. Foxy and Freddy talking while Foxy reads a newspaper labeled Friday,
and then a wider shot where we see they’re in a classroom and the numbers 5+4 and also
3 are written on the board.
These being the only numbers on the page, it seems that
this 5+4 and 3 are somehow meant to lead us to the real value of the $16 coupon.
I promise I’m not going to reference GiBi in EVERY video I make, but I’m also not going
to take credit for something I didn’t think of by myself. GiBi very correctly says the only
action that makes sense here is to add 5+4 and multiply it by 3 to get 27 and plug it into
the official inflation calculator. $16 in fnaf 1 is worth $27 now, and we can use the inflation
calculation to figure out what year fnaf 1 took place. So we plug in 16 and start guessing dates
against the date now, but when is the date now?
So now it’s finally time to
talk about fnaf 3 I suppose.
The description of fnaf 3 says “Thirty years
after Freddy Fazbear's Pizza closed its doors, the events that took place there have become
nothing more than a rumor and a childhood memory, but the owners of "Fazbear's Fright: The Horror
Attraction" are determined to revive the legend”
Now there are two interpretations of what it means
for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza to close its doors.
#1 It’s talking about when the last
Freddy’s location, the fnaf 1 location, closed.
If this is the case it is of absolutely
no use to us with the inflation calculator because both dates are then unknown and there are many
dates for which $16 would convert into $27.
This interpretation has another problem because
as we know from Pizzeria Simulator, Fazbear’s became a franchise, meaning entrepreneurs
paid for the right to open a location under the Fazbear name and start up a restaurant, and
at least one was opened by Mike. And pizzeria simulator absolutely takes place after Fnaf
3. So Fnaf 3 cannot take place 30 years after Fazbear closes its doors because then it would
have to take place after Pizzeria Simulator, and it takes place before Pizzeria Simulator.
I am making it clear in this section that I don’t believe fnaf 3 took place in the future at time
of release, but if you believe that it did I am NOT calling that theory stupid.
This is fnaf and
all things are unknowable. No theory is stupid. I am just wholly convinced by GiBi that it’s
Option #2 – it’s referring to the close of the original Freddy Fazber’s Pizza, the MCI
location, that closed in 1985 after the MCI, making Fnaf 3 take place in 2015,
the year that the game came out.
So then… we want to plug in $27 in 2015
into the calculator and find what year it would’ve been worth $16… ehhh.
It’s never that simple with fnaf.
Because the “real value” in this book could
be referencing the real value in 2015, the year fnaf 3 takes place and when this
book would’ve been published in-universe
OR it could be referencing when this book was
actually published in the real world, in 2017.
So we’ll try it against both dates and see
what happens… but wait… inflation rates are constantly changing and we have the option
to plug in months as well as just the year.
Luckily my full time job is working with
spreadsheets and I am obsessed with fnaf, and I spreadsheeted out this inflation
conversion for many plausible dates.
The plausible dates for fnaf 1 are any year from
1987 through 2003, but I actually stopped at 1998 because the numbers got so far from $27 it
wasn’t worth doing more. And for each year fnaf 1 could take place I checked two months,
January and November. November because that’s the year fnaf 1 actually takes place, and January
because if you’re just doing the conversion year to year and not paying attention to months,
it’s standard to go January to January.
Now for the dates for Fnaf
3 or the Security Logbook
January 2015, the year of fnaf 3
March of 2015, the month the game actually came out
August and December of 2015 because we don’t know what month Fnaf
3 takes place in and I wanted to cover my bases in case the date is one day revealed.
January 2017, the year of the security logbook
Oct/November of 2017, the month the
Security Logbook likely would’ve been in writting/editing/quality assured==ance
December of 2017, the month the Security Logbook came out.
If you’re wondering why I don’t at least include the 2023 date to be fair to people who believe in
that theory, it’s because you can’t really predict inflation, which means Scott could not have put in
this book that was published in 2017 a calculation for inflation five years in the future.
Behold my spreadsheet, so pretty and color coordinated.
As you can see, dates where $16 is worth about $27 for any combination of the dates in questions
range from 1990 to 1994.
Conveniently, those years also fit with the minimum wage range. There are
a few extra numbers that are $26 and ever so many cents that round up to $27, but no new years
are included by representing those numbers.
Now, which of these numbers are the most
likely to be the intended solution? Two stand out to me because of how close they are to
$27 exactly. The first is the date GiBi proposes, 1992.
This number is obtained taking January 1992
against January 2015 aka the proposed year of fnaf 1 against the year of fnaf 3. The second likely
date is 1993. This is from November 1993 against anywhere from October to December of 2017 aka the
year and month of fnaf 1 against the months of writing and publishing the Security Logbook.
If you’re watching the screen here and not listening to this video like a podcast, you
might notice that I didn’t highlight one date that actually gives us $27 perfectly, January
of 1994 with October/November of 2017.
That’s because I find it really unlikely Scott
used the specific month of the Security Logbook but not the specific month of Fnaf 1.
If this was October/November of the Security Logbook with NOVEMBER 1994, I’d be sold, but
October/November with January is just weird.
All that to say, 1992 and 1993 are my most likely
candidates based on Security Logbook evidence, BUT 1990-1994 are still reasonable…
Oh? You thought we were done with this page, in this, the most in depth guide to when Fnaf 1
takes place that you’ll EVER need? I think not.
There’s one other detail on this page. Foxy is
reading a newspaper that says “Friday.” Call me a conspiracy theorist who’s up too late writing this
script, but you cannot convince me that’s just a meaningless inclusion. I think Scott is trying to
tell us that Friday is important to figuring out these dates as well… and, well, we have a specific
date that we get paid in Fnaf 1, November the 12th. We can check to see if it’s a Friday.
We get paid on November 12. November 12, 1992 was a Thursday which makes November
12, 1993 a FRIDAY. Case closed!
Except not entirely because a fun fact people love
to mention when they are in favor of the year 1992 is that it’s a wink from Scott to place his games
in a year that has a Friday the 13th.
So this Friday on the newspaper could be taken to confirm
two theories: one that you get paid at Fazbear Inc on a Friday and November 12 has to be a Friday,
OR that Scott set his horror game in a week that has a Friday the 13th. After all, in Fnaf 2, your
overtime check comes on November 13, 1987, Friday the 13th. If Fnaf 1 is in 1992, your overtime
paycheck would also be on a Friday the 13th.
So while this doesn’t help distinguish
between our two favorite dates, I believe it does help us rule out 1990, 91, and 94.
What’s that? Could it possibly be…? Is it really time for my FAVORITE fnaf book The Week Before
to solve all fnaf lore for all time for us?
That’s right! The new fnaf Interactive Novel
aka Choose Your Own Adventure but they can’t say that or they’ll get copyrighted
book is here to solve everything!
It’s time to bid farewell to GiBi’s as the
mastermind behind this piece of evidence and say hello to Unwithered Truth who has made
an incredible theory about when fnaf 1 takes place based on evidence in The Week Before.
There are a lot of pop culture references in The Week Before and right off the bat I am deferring
to Unwithered Truth’s research about them because pop culture references are so lost on me and
genuinely many references sail over my head. I didn’t have access to the internet or watch
media more recent than the 70s for the bulk of my developmental years (no I was not raised Amish).
I said I was done talking about GiBi but they pointed out recently that a weakness of a lot
of theorists are not being able to identify when fnaf is referencing other media or tropes
and it’s a big reason why I have to be diligent about listening to other theorists because I
was raised under a rock.
And media references are not like a 3D render in the game where you’re
like huh I see that thing but I don’t know what it is. Let me go on the Game Theory reddit and
see if anyone’s talked about it. When you miss a pop culture reference, more often than not,
you don’t even know it. You just read over it, maybe think huh that sentence was worded
weird, and don’t even know to look it up.
Every theorist has their weaknesses and blind
spots. Full transparency: that’s one of mine, and I’m so grateful that fnaf has an enormous
community of passionate theorists who I can lean on to overcome my blindspots. We
make progress towards the story when we collaborate and rely on each other, so if
I’m ever missing a pop culture reference, tell me about it in the comments so I can add
it to my list to watch, read, or listen to.
All that said, Unwithered Truth says of all
references to real world media and technology we have in The Week Before, the Sega Genesis gaming
console that came out in August of 1989 is the most recent, and I scrolled all the way down in
the comments to see if anyone contradicted that evidence and found nothing. They also point out
that we get a reference to multiple Lethal Weapon movies, another 1989 date, strengthening
that fnaf 1 takes place 1989 or after.
This evidence goes against 1987 and 1988 dates,
though 1987 was never likely at all since they’d have to have opened a month after fnaf 2 closed.
We learn from The Week Before that the Fnaf 1 location is only recently reopened.
The phone
guy, Ralph, and others throughout the book have a lot to say about the Fnaf 2 location.
Wendy is a 911 operator who Ralph can call in one of the Game Over endings. She
references a tragic 911 call from Freddy’s.
“Freddy’s? I thought they closed up. After
that horri—” She draws in a shaky breath. “I didn’t take those calls, thankfully, but I heard
the recordings and, well, it wasn’t pretty.”
Wendy could be referring to either the original
Missing Children’s Incident in 1985 or the Bite of ‘87 and surrounding incidents. 1987 is more
likely because the MCI calls would likely sound something like “Please can you send an officer
down? I can’t find my child and they were last seen in the party room at Freddy’s.”
Whereas the Bite of ‘87 call would likely sound more like “Gahhh SOMEONE’S been BITTEN THEIR
BRAIN is EXPOSED SEND PARAMEDICS OH THE HUmANITY”
And of those two calls, I would characterize one
as worrying and eventually saddening whereas the other I would describe as (inhale) “I didn’t
take those calls, thankfully, but I heard the recordings and, well, it wasn’t pretty.”
All that to say, Wendy remembers the Fnaf 2 locations but the Fnaf 1 location has been open
so recently that a 911 operator hasn’t heard of it yet.
Which is impressive because I can imagine
Freddy’s getting 911 called on them a lot.
And again, Ralph’s boss references that
a reporter is visiting to see how the location is doing since they reopened.
These pieces of information make the dates closer to the 2000s much less likely. Would
Freddy’s have been closed for almost 15 years and people still be talking like this? Also
if Freddy’s was closed for even five years, what has Ralph been doing? He’s been employed with
the company for what he describes as “ages.” He’s taken no new jobs between Fnaf 2 and Fnaf 1.
If there are no locations open between then, was he just sitting at home for years
waiting for Freddy’s to call him up again?
Pretty unlikely. Being in middle management,
he was probably kept on between locations to help dismantle the Fnaf 2 paraphernalia and
reassemble it in this new comeback location. And that process might take more than a year,
but certainly not more than three or four.
However, one piece of evidence from this
book might make us rethink that. Ralph dials the voicemail code into the phone on
Night 1 and listens to an old recording of himself. The book then says this “You hang
up. You know the rest. It’s strange to listen to a recording of yourself, especially one
from so long ago. If you remember correctly, your daughter had just been born—a big reason
why you couldn’t take the night shift yourself at the time.” We know from elsewhere in the book
that Coppelia is 11, turning 12 in December.
If Fazbear was founded in 1983, then that’s the
earliest date Ralph could’ve started.
If Coppelia was born in December of 1983, that would put
Fnaf 1 all the way in 1995, but perhaps she was born December of 1982 and then she would still
only be a few months old when Ralph could’ve recorded these. And we could probably even push
it back one year. If she’s born in December 1981 and Fazbear is founded in January of 1983, she
would’ve just barely hit a year old if Ralph started Day 1 with the company. At just barely
a year, it’s reasonable for Ralph to call that “around when she was born.” I certainly wouldn’t
be comfortable working the night shift as a single parent with a 1 year old daughter at home.
However, the more likely interpretation is that Coppelia was born in 1982 and
was a few months old in 1983.
The range of acceptable dates that leaves
us with is 1993 or 1994 at the earliest.
Meaning that there was a six or more year
gap where Ralph was employed by the company despite no new locations opening.
But once again Unwithered Truth makes an appearance to argue that maybe
we shouldn’t pay attention to these dates at all for a few very good reasons.
First of all, even though this page was in the official published book, you actually can’t
reach this page by playing the game.
The Week Before is a choose-you-own-adventure style game
where you pick an action out of a list of options and are led to a new bit of story where you make
another decision. Some decisions you can make are locked behind items. So in the past, you had to
pick options that would lead you to collecting the item, and you can progress with certain
options only if you picked up that item.
The option you have to select to get to this
page requires you to have a voicemail code to punch into the phone on Night 1. Only trouble
is, you can’t get that item until Night 4.
There’s another instance of this happening, where
you have an option that requires an item you can’t get, but that page is a troll page that calls
you out for cheating and using an item you don’t have.
This page… says nothing of the sort.
Instead, Ralph listens to the voicemail, makes not one but TWO incorrect statements,
and then continues on his journey.
The first incorrect statement on this page is the
one that every theorist has pointed out by now: Ralph says he never brought Coppelia to
Freddy’s even on Bring Your Child to Work Day. Later in the book, Ralph says Coppelia threw
up when he took her to work when she was seven
The second incorrect statement comes when Ralph
remarks that the system sent an old recording, so this must be a glitch. He says this because
this recording is really similar to the Fnaf 1 Night 1 phone call, but it’s slightly different.
This line is meant to explain to the viewer why the phone call is different than the one you
actually get on Night 1.
The phone glitched, we got an older version.
Except we know why we don’t get that version of the call in Fnaf 1. It’s
a pretty major plot point that Ralph records those messages this week. And he hasn’t
recorded them yet because it’s Night 1.
So why is Ralph calling the
current message an old message?
Candi, I hear you saying, it’s possible it’s
still an older recording and that there have been multiple iterations. Maybe this is an OLD old
recording. Yeah it is, but five pages before this page, Ralph says they’ve probably been using his
same recordings for ages. Maybe he should update them AND he said he doesn’t use that phone
much at all. He just records the messages and management sets them up to ring automatically.
If Ralph recorded and hasn’t listened to them for ages, I just have a hard believing that
he would hear one of the old old recordings and even realize it was an older version. I really
think this line was meant to explain why the line is different from the Fnaf 1 line.
Because as Unwithered Truth says, this page is from an earlier iteration of
the book, from before they’d decided how old Coppelia was and before they realized Phone
Guy needed to record his messages over the course of the book. And it wasn’t properly removed.
Unwithered Truth also points out that there’s basically a better version of this page elsewhere
in the book, where Ralph hears one of his old recordings and makes the same sort of remark he
makes on this page about how he wishes he could give advice to his younger self. Further evidence
that this page just wasn’t meant to be here.
You might be wondering how likely it is that a
whole page of the book could remain in in error. Pretty likely. There’s a sort of similar mistake
elsewhere in the book, where the book assumes you have to have picked up a coin to beat night 2 and
you choose whether or not to give it to Coppelia. Except you definitely didn’t pick up that coin
because you can’t pick it up and beat Night 2.
How can this be the case?
Well a Choose Your Own Adventure Style book is pretty difficult to quality
assure.
You don’t just read it front to back like a normal book to make sure it reads
coherently. You have to make a pretty complex flowchart of all of the options the player
can take and read it that way. It’s a little surprising actually that the coin mistake made
it through because a playtest through the final copy would show that you can’t get the coin.
However it’s not surprising at all that a page would be left in in error. If you’re reading
through the book to make sure it makes logical sense, by reading through the book AS INTENDED
instead page-by-page, you’d never get to that page to see that it’s an error and you’re not likely
to remember that there was one option you never clicked on.
This book approaches 300 pages with
over 50 endings and two difficulty settings.
Having said all that, I have just
got to point out how strange it is that on the error page Ralph says this.
“You’ve never brought Coppelia here. Not even on Bring Your Child to Work Day.
Especially not then.”
It really makes me wonder if this was meant to
hint at the death of Charlie or even that some of the MCI victims were employees' children.
But if
I really think this page is from an older version, I’ve got to toss out that little ominous
hint along with the other evidence, and I really do think this page is an error.
There’s another statement in the book that many have pointed to as being an inconsistency, but
Unwithered Truth uses as the crux of their theory: Coppelia knows the name Fredbear.
“You looked like that Fredbear thing from your job.”
“You mean Freddy Fazbear?”
“Whatever. He weirds me out. They all do.
People consider this line to be an error because of the passage we just talked about. She would
just be too young to remember that suit when it was retired and buried away from the public eye in
1985 in time for the Missing Children’s Incident
But it’s the crux of Unwithered Truth’s theory.
They claim that doing away with the error page about when Coppelia was born, we can combine her
knowing Fredbear’s name with the fact that she was brought to Freddy’s when she was 7 to infer that
her 7th birthday took place right before the suits were retired, meaning her 7th birthday was in
December 1984 and her upcoming 12th birthday will be December 1989, the year Fnaf 1 takes place.
It’s an incredible theory.
And while I absolutely agree that the page about when she was born
is not a trustworthy lore source, in this, THE MOST in depth guide to when Fnaf 1 takes
place that You’ll EVER NEED, as always, we need to consider some alternative explanations.
Because we just don’t know for certain that it was Coppelia’s seventh birthday bash that
caused the name Fredbear to be burned into her mind. Let’s look at the page in question.
“She’s never gotten over the time you brought her to work to meet the animatronics when
she was seven, and they made her cry so hard she threw up her pizza and cake. She had
nightmares for at least a week afterward.”
Ralph took her to work to MEET the
animatronics when she was seven, meaning this was indeed her first trip
to the restaurant. And she had nightmares and cried and threw up because of them,
We know from The Week Before that Ralph is a great dad.
Fnaf once upon a time had only
horrible father figures and it made us worried for Scott and wonder what male mentor made him
make all fictional fathers like the worst, most neglectful and abusive characters in all of fnaf.
But no more. We’ve got Ralph and Cassie’s dad AND Oswald’s dad and they’re all FAAANtastic.
And honestly of the three, Ralph is winning the Father of the Year award. He’s just a
really caring and thoughtful father to Coppelia. It’s really sweet. Makes his death really sad.
So it is extremely unlikely that Ralph ever brought Coppelia back to this place she has
such a horrible memory of and hates so much.
So Unwithered Truth’s theory is looking really
solid. For her to know Fredbear, her seventh birthday is kind of her only opportunity…
IF Fredbear was only an animatronic. But Fredbear was also a popular cartoon character and
merchline, which does pose a problem as Coppelia, like her father, and unlike me, is full
of references to media around her time.
And Ralph, ever the Fazbear enthusiast,
absolutely would’ve been putting on Fredbear and Friends for her to watch as a little kid.
And Ralph was around with the company during the days of the old springlock suits. He recorded the
training tapes about how to use them safely… well, as safe as you can. And Ralph likely
would’ve mentioned the name Fredbear to his daughter back in the old days when
he was still a character in the rotation.
All that in mind, what date ranges are
reasonable for Coppelia to remember the name of Fredbear from the cartoon or from
frequent mentioning around the house?
Well you tend to start retaining most of your
memories from age 4 and on. If the Fredbear character is retired in time for the MCI in June
of 1985, Coppelia was born at earliest 1980, meaning the fact that she knows Fredbear
could point to a date anytime between 1989 and 1992. 1993 if you think she would remember
the name Fredbear at 3 years and 6 months old.
So once again we’re just dancing around the
same dates we've been toying with since 2014.
Oh but baby we are not done with the week
before.
Let’s look at some more hints.
How about this page, where Ralph
reminisces about Fredbear’s Family Diner:
“The green color has faded, along with the words
stamped on it: FREDBEAR’S FAMILY DINER. Now that’s a throwback! That place has been closed for
years, but it was a predecessor to Fazbear Entertainment’s Freddy’s Pizza franchise.
This artifact might just be worth more than the gold ring if you found the right buyer.
Freddy’s biggest fans will buy anything!”
Fredbear’s Family Diner is a throwback, you
say? That place was open in 1983. Calling something a throwback usually means that thing
is a reference to a different era. Often we use it to mean throwback to a different decade. I
might say My Chemical Romance is a throwback to the 2000s or bell bottoms are a throwback to
the 70s. However, people do also use throwback when something reminds them of a different
era of their life personally. Even people who are only a few years out of college might say
something is a throwback to their college years.
So I don’t think the word itself has a
ton of insight for us, because I think it could mean anything from five years
to multiple decades in this context.
But the fact that a Fredbear’s Family
Diner artifact in weathered condition is a vintage Fazbear artifact that could be
worth more than a gold ring? That does sound like we might be creeping up on a decade
or more of Fredbear’s being closed.
How about another instance of a very subjective
word? Ralph says the animatronics have been restored to their classic look for this new
location, but he says it in a very specific way: “You’re glad they restored the vintage
animatronic with his classic look“ Vintage.
Of all the dates I’m still seriously
playing around with fnaf 1 taking place in, being 1989-1993, vintage is a
strong word for an animatronic designed in 1983, when Fazbear was founded.
While this line could be pointing us towards some later dates or be an error or an exaggeration,
what I’m really hoping is that it’s hinting that we’re going to get some serious closure on
one particularly frustrating piece of evidence sometime soon.
“If I were forced to sing… those
same stupid songs for 20 years.” This line is so out of place compared to all our other evidence.
It really seemed like Scott threw this line away and disowned it. It’s the only line that points to
fnaf 1 being in the late late 90s or early 2000s.
And yet, with this one line, “they restored the
vintage animatronic with his classic look” Scott seems to have reclaimed that old line. Vintage?
Ten years is not vintage.
But twenty years? Yeah that’s starting to creep up on vintage.
So am I about to say the early 2000s dates are back in the running?
Actually no. There is just so much evidence to the contrary, but I think this shows
us that some of the Freddy’s characters, including Freddy Fazbear, may predate Fazbear incorporated,
just like RyeToast suggested with his theory about Fallfest. And finally, even though we haven’t
seen when the characters themselves were created, I feel I can put to rest the line about the
animatronics being 20 years old and trust that by the time Fnaf 28 releases, Scott or Steelwool
or MegaCat or whoever is running things by then, will have an answer for us.
Are we done with evidence from The Week Before? Haha In This? THE MOST
IN DEPTH GUIDE TO WHEN FNAF 1 TAKES PLACE THAT YOU WILL EVER NEED? Absolutely not.
But let’s move away from vague wording and towards some more concrete evidence.
Back on the old: is Fazbear, or more realistically Scott, consistent about what days
the employees get paid, we actually know what day of the week each night of The Week Before
takes place on because Coppelia goes to school for four days and skips school on Friday.
Meaning Night 1, Ralph is rolling up to the building 11:55pm Sunday night and
clocking in just as the clock rolls over to midnight of Monday morning.
If we are to assume he is working the same workweek as all night guards at that
location do, then Mike Schmidt/Afton also has his night 1 on Sunday night technically
Monday morning. If Mike gets his paycheck at the end of his fifth shift, he is getting paid on
Friday afternoon and working overtime Saturday.
And that is firmly in favor of 1993
because November 12, 1993 is a Friday.
However, it is not guaranteed that Ralph and
Mike are working the same days of the week because we don’t see Ralph get his paycheck.
He does put in for overtime on night 6, but overtime has nothing to do with what day
of the week you work and everything to do with how many hours you work in a pay period.
It is still possible for Mike to take his first shift on Saturday night/Sunday morning and get
paid on Thursday. In fact, it would make a lot of sense since Phone Guy’s last night is Night
6 Friday night/Saturday morning and the shift is conveniently open for Mike the next day.
Groovy. As ever, we dance around 92 and 93.
And now for my secret weapon piece of evidence
I have been holding onto until the very very end. Let’s talk about Bronwen’s. Phone.
If you’re going for the true ending of the game, then Ralph must collect Bronwen’s mobile phone
on Night 6. And we even get a picture of it.
Let’s research some old phones shall we.
The original mobile phones were analog. Nowadays we use digital phones.
What is analog
vs digital? I don’t know. Many websites attempted to explain it to me with minimal success. As far
as I can understand and hopefully we’ll get some commenters that can make this more clear,
an analog phone sends messages using radio frequencies and operates on a continuum whereas
digital signals come through in binary. Each type of signal has advantages and disadvantages
and we decided digital is better for cellphones, but I don’t really understand because I’m
pretty sure digital phones use radio waves as well. They just use them… differently…
somehow. Whatever the case, digital won out over analog because it’s quicker and cheaper
and more useful for the way we use phones.
The very first commercially available mobile
phone was an analog phone produced in 1983: The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, Cool name. You could
use it for 30 whole minutes on a single charge. This phone is way too chunky and boxy and big to
be Bronwen’s phone from the photo, not to mention it cost $4,000 and very few people owned one.
This phone is also not considered very portable because it couldn’t hold much of a charge and
it was frankly a beast.
Cellular phones were installed as car phones for those very reasons
Up until the 1989 Motorola MicroTAC 9800X
While the name doesn’t sound as cool as
the DynaTAC, this phone was sick. I mean, look at that 9 inch sleek design, perfectly
suited to fit neatly in your shirt pocket, not to mention tripling the battery life
to accommodate 90 minutes of talk time.
Also apparently the antennae
on the phone was entirely for show and the actual antennae was internal.
Unwithered Truth if you’re watching this video, I want you to know I saw you used the MicroTAC as
your visual when you talked about Brownen’s phone, the only reasonable model of phone that
would’ve been available with your proposed date of 1989. That attention to detail is
just incredible. So much thought went into not only your theory but also the visuals
and audio, with absolutely no guarantee that anyone would ever know you researched phone
models to be accurate. Really impressive
This phone could fit the bill for
Brownen’s phone except for a few problems
#1 the design of the phone image we’re given
does not feature this iconic flip-up piece for protecting the numpad and the screen
is significantly smaller than the image.
#2 The standby time.
This refers to how long the
battery on the phone lasts if you don’t use it at all before you have to charge it. And I have had a
devil of a time trying to find the standby time on this model, but I believe the standby time on the
original MicroTac was 30 hours. Even if we give or take some hours to account for errors because
my source didn’t cite its sources, this phone just couldn’t stay awake long enough for Ralph
to make phone calls over the course of 5 nights. Ralph doesn’t have a mobile phone himself, which
means he couldn’t have been charging it at home.
#3 The price – The MicroTac retailed for
$3,000. Now it’s possible Bronwen worked for a news agency that had that kind of money,
or she had wealthy tech-enthusiast parents buuut very unlikely. This phone was EXPENSIVE.
There are several more iterations of the MicroTac, the MicroTAC lite in 91, then the MicroTAC
Classic also 91, and ultra lite in 92, the first phone to have a vibration ringer, then
the Elite in 94, and the 650 in 96. IF Scott or EC Meyers researched the history of mobile phones
for writing this, and it’s very possible they did NOT and instead went off of their personal memory
of what phones were around at that time because they’re both born in 1978 and would remember,
it is so improbable they looked up any of these phones because they only come up once you start
going down the google rabbit hole of the original MicroTac itself.
That said, I’ll give special
mention to the MicroTac 650 in 1996 for fitting the design of Bronwen’s phone most closely.
Please welcome the 1992 Motorola International 3200, another chunky beast. This was the first
digital mobile phone, which still doesn’t mean much to me because I didn’t understand analog
in the first place. Wikipedia says this phone resembles an elongated brick and they are right.
This phone unfortunately has all the same issues as the MicroTac being extremely unsimilar to the
image we have, retailing at I THINK around $1050, which is admittedly more reasonable,
and with only 8 hours of standby.
But as far as I can tell this
phone was sold in the UK, so there’s no reason Bronwen should own it and
no reason Cawthon or Meyers would remember it.
Let’s move on.
The Nokia 1011 was called the 1011 because it was released on the 10th of November 1992. This
phone and its successors the 2010 and 2110 are the earliest designs I can find that start to fit the
design of Bronwen’s phone, however we are still far from the battery life we need with the 1011’s
battery only lasting for 12 hours on standby.
The 1993 IBM Simon is frankly so visually
distinct that there’s no way this is what they had in mind. Pretty cool though.
At this point in my research I realized I should probably stop going phone-by-phone and look at our
three problems: design, battery life, and cost, and see when we start to hit those benchmarks.
Easiest first. Design. In 1992 the 1011 was already decently close. We’re looking for phones
that are rectangular with rounded corners, decently thin, large screen, an antennae, and
minimal buttons besides the numpad. The 1994 Nokia 2110 that I mentioned before fits pretty
well or maybe the 96 Nortel Nevada, but that was a UK phone, which led me down a rabbit hole of why a
phone in Europe would be named after Nevada… turns out Nevada comes from the Spanish nieve meaning
snow and the state of Nevada is named for the mountain range the Sierra Nevadas and about 700
of my viewers are from Nevada. Ain’t that neat.
From 1994 on we have plenty
of models that fit the bill
How about battery life?
I used to write academic papers all the time and I swear it was not this hard to find a source that
cited its source.
I started digging pretty deep looking for reliable information on some of these
old phone models before I realized… there’s no WAY Scott and EC Meyers were turning to Google Scholar
to find how much standby time Bronwen’s phone had, so I let it go and am sourcing my information from
engagingwithcommunications.com. The first phone they list to hit the benchmark of lasting 5 days
on standby without a charge is the 1996 Nokia 8110 which could apparently go for 6 days.
How about affordability?
Now there are lots of sources out there
that can tell me phone prices took a dip following the MicroTAC and went from $3000 to
just under $1000, where they have been sitting pretty steadily ever since, with a few dips (the
Blackberry Pearl went for about $350 in 2006). $1000 is a lot for a junior news reporter.
The Motorola m300 in 1993 was designed to be for the masses, including a much lower cost at
around $400.
But this was another UK phone.
However, ya don’t usually buy a phone for
the full cost. You sign up for two years of Verizon and trade in your old model and they
knock $450 off. When did people start doing that? If I thought phone battery life was hard
to find info on this really took the cake. I heard 90s. I heard late 90s. I got one completely
unverifiable source said T-Mobile started it and didn’t even give a year. Sources were so hard
to find I CALLED MY GRANDPA. He didn’t know, but apparently they bought my mom a bag phone
when she went to college. Super groovy.
The conclusion: The practice of offering a
phone discount when you sign up with a carrier was established at an unknown time in the 90s,
and phones in the US got cheaper around 93.
Putting all these factors together, the
earliest model Bronwen’s phone could be in terms of our latest limiting factor,
battery life, isn’t available until 1996.
The earliest model you could afford without
being the bourgeoisie maayybe 93 when the IBM Simon dipped below the $1000 mark.
The earliest design model that could fit the reference image is December 1992.
The earliest model that’s not the size of a concrete slab, 1989.
Now… we’ve gone through each piece of evidence we could find. Let’s do a flyby of every
detail we’ve examined through this whole video. And more than that, let’s think critically about
how much weight we should put on each clue we’ve been given. We’ll put ourselves into the shoes of
Scott Cawthon and ask how much forethought he put into each of the details we’re looking at.
Back to fnaf 1.
Fnaf 1 takes place after Fnaf 2, and Fnaf
2 happens in November of 1987. This piece of evidence is clean and irrevocable. Scott
clearly made this decision intentionally, and we have no contradicting evidence to
suggest Fnaf 1 takes place before 1987.
Fnaf 1 is a Chuck E Cheese analogue and the
heyday of Chuck E Cheese was in the late 80s through the 90s.
This? Loose evidence. Nothing
is keeping Scott from putting his fictional Chuck E Cheese equivalent in a different decade.
“If I were forced to sing… those same stupid songs for 20 years and I never got a bath…” This line
is really clear. Unlike being a Chuck E Cheese analogue, this is what I’d call hard evidence, but
it has two big flaws. The first is that it points to a date around 2003, which is the latest date
we’re ever pointed to by a margin of 5-6 years.
The second is just how early in the franchise it’s
said. Information from the earlier fnaf games, but especially fnaf 1, need to be
interpreted in light of the fact that there wasn’t planning for a franchise.
At some point, Scott realized he had a franchise on his hands, and realized that he wasn’t just a
storyteller but also a puzzlemaker. He definitely didn’t realize as early as fnaf 1. For how little
story points we got in fnaf 1, even fewer of them were followed up on as the story continued.
Because this evidence comes so early and is not supported as we go along,
this is weak evidence to me.
Up next is the paycheck. As we know Scott seemed
to have googled minimum wage in 1987 for fnaf 2, but no minimum wage calculations anywhere in
the US for any year follow the same pattern for the Fnaf 1 paycheck, as such I have to conclude
that Scott went off of either vibes or his own memory for the time period he had in mind, and
was likely thinking of a year 1997 or earlier, when he and his peers could’ve been making
around that much in the real world.
But we have it in our power to do the calculation
and see that 1987-1990, a pay rate of $4/hour before deductions is legal, and from 1987-1995,
a payright of $4/hour after deductions is legal.
Evidence going forwards seems to support dates
from the late 80s to mid 90s, and as such, it seems Scott honored his original number
for the paycheck.
Dates before 1995 are well supported by this evidence.
Finally, the evidence that the day of the week Fazbear pays its employees is
Thursday. This evidence comes from Fnaf 2, which is pretty early for Scott to have come
into his own as Puzzlemaster. This is also not the reason why Scott put the year on the paycheck.
He wasn’t trying to tell us what day of the week we get paid, he’s trying to tell us Jeremy is
about to get his frontal lobe bit off. As such, I have to count this as weak evidence.
Our evidence from Fnaf 4 and Sister Location told us Mike Schmidt/Afton is the player
and roughly how old he is in 1987. This did not affect our understanding of minimum
wage, and therefore is irrelevant evidence.
The Security Logbook has our next clues, and here
we tick over from weak evidence that we’re not really sure Scott thought out to very
strong evidence. Because if any piece of fnaf media represents Scott’s switch from
storyteller to puzzlemaster, it’s the book that’s full of puzzles that took years to solve.
The inflation calculation for 27$ in either 2015 or 2017 down to 16$ in the past gave us
the range of dates from 1990-1994, with 1992 matching up perfectly with the 2015 date and
1993 matching up perfectly with the 2017 date.
If you think fnaf 3 takes place in 2023, thirty
years after the date MatPat proposed for fnaf 1, then the 1992-2015 combo is out and we’ve solved
the date! If you think fnaf 3 takes place in 2015, thirty years after the original Freddy
Fazbear’s Pizza and the year fnaf 3 came out, then both 1992 and 1993 remain on the table.
1992 and 93 are extremely strong evidence points in my book, especially when
combined with the Friday newspaper that is likely referencing either Friday the
13th of 1992 or Friday November 12, 1993.
The Week Before referencing pop culture
up to 1989 is strong evidence that Fnaf 1 does not take place before that point.
The suspicious page about Coppelia just being born when Ralph started working for Fazbear
is weak evidence to me, but I can understand if it’s strong evidence to some.
The fact that
the page seems to have been left in error is enough to condemn it for me, but if that detail
is true, Fnaf 1 must take place at the earliest 1993, but far more likely 1994 and on.
Coppelia knows the name of Fredbear, which could’ve put her seventh birthday right before the
MCI and put Fnaf 1 in 1989, OR she could remember from watching the Fredbear and Friends cartoon as
a younger kid. This puts Fnaf 1 1992 and before comfortably, and we can loop in 1993 with some
skepticism about if Coppelia would remember a show she watched when she was only three and a half.
Is this weak evidence or strong evidence? I’m not sure to be honest. It’s hard to
tell if this was supposed to be a big intentional clue or just dialogue without
too much thought behind it.
Y’all can let me know which you think it is in the comments!
The vibe of everyone’s attitude about Fredbear’s Family Diner, The Bite of 87, and how long Ralph
has been working with Fazbear all seem to me to be strong evidence, meaning they were decisions
for the book that were made intentionally with full knowledge, but they’re not specific enough
to give us a date. Fredbear’s is a throwback, its memorabilia is for collectors.
The Bite
of 87 is fresh in everyone’s memory. Ralph has been working for Freddy’s for ages, for
way too long, for many years. There doesn’t seem to be too long a gap between the restaurant
closing in 1987 and this restaurant opening now.
All those non-specific statements give me
the feel that Fnaf 1 location was open around 1989-1991. While I think the wordings are all
intentional decisions, trying to pin them down to a specific year is not possible. I’ve tried
citing “that’s just the vibe” in an academic paper and let me tell you it did not fly.
The actual days of the week The Week Before takes place on are to me irrelevant
information because we don’t actually see which of the days Ralph gets his paycheck
or learn what day Mike starts his first shift.
And finally, the phone.
The phone has
a few elements to discuss separately.
The inclusion of a mobile phone must put fnaf 1
after 1983. At the bare minimum Cawthon or Meyers must’ve googled “when was the first mobile phone.”
This is very strong, but also irrelevant because we know Fnaf 1 takes place after 1983.
The battery life of mobile phones is less strong evidence. I know from my own research how
difficult it is to find some of this information from a credible source, which leads me to
believe that like the fnaf 1 paycheck, the phone was likely the result of Cawthon or Meyer’s own
memory of mobile phones in the late 80s or 90s.
I find it very unlikely they thought of
how long the battery would last on standby, and if they did, they likely concluded they
didn’t need to bother with accuracy there because this is an alternate universe where the
Funtimes existed in the 80s. They probably had some better battery technology in this universe.
The design of the phone I at first thought would be strong evidence, until I considered the process
by which this piece of art would’ve come to be in this book.
It probably looked like Scott or
someone at Scholastic hitting up an artist, whose name I cannot find anywhere, and gave
them the book, where they needed images, and maybe a vague description like “Bonnie’s
head on the ground” and “old mobile phone”
Leaving the only phone evidence I think is
actually strong to be “when could a normal person afford a phone that fit in their pocket”
to which the answer is “The early 90s and on.”
So… what date do I think it is? 1992.
But the absolute NUMBER 1 takeaway from this video is that if you ever see someone
putting out a date that is after November 1987 and before 2014, you may not say they are
obviously wrong because absolutely nothing about when fnaf 1 takes place is quote “obvious.”
Did I miss anything, or did I fail to place proper importance on a piece of evidence you think
is the key to it all? I read all my comments so you’re welcome to let me know! That’s all for
this one cadets.
Gosh I love that, I’m Candi, and these are my cadets. Ahahah. Ahh
I have been Candi Buunny, and I have candy all day. Candy. Candy. Candi..
