Fridge / Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's Main Fridge Page
Games: Five Nights at Freddy's | Five Nights at Freddy's 2 | Five Nights at Freddy's 3 | Five Nights at Freddy's 4 | Five Nights at Freddy's World | Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location | Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator | Ultimate Custom Night | Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted | Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery | Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach
Novels: Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes

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As this is a Fridge page, spoilers will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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Fridge Brilliance

• It seems pretty strange that Phone Guy, your predecessor, continually plays down just how dangerous and deadly your job (not to mention the robots) really is. He makes the robots' preferred method of killing (shoving you into a suit filled with sharp metal and wires) sound like a mildly uncomfortable inconvenience. However, it's possible that he knew (or suspected) that your employers (or maybe the robots themselves) would be listening in on his recordings, so he tries not to raise any alarms while still trying his best to warn you of the dangers you're facing. He even mentions that the robots' horrifying behavior isn't brought up during the employment process, leaving you, the new security guard, extremely vulnerable. So, to rectify this, he made a recording to impart some of his wisdom to you, even if he couldn't actually just tell you to leave and never return.
  • Consider a more sinister possibility. He's trying to leave this job, as he's stated that he's finishing up his last week. What if he's downplaying it as much as possible because he desperately wants to leave this position? Maybe the employers at Freddy's have some sort of legal power over him to keep him on the job unless he finds a replacement? What if they have that same power over the protagonist so that he HAS to keep coming back each night until he dies or is (luckily) fired?
  • There might even be a sadder possibility. When Phone Guy explains the behavior of the animatronics to you, he says that they aren't malicious and their behavior is just part of their programming, but you also know he's been there long enough to have seen first-hand Foxy's behaviour, as well as the events of night 5, which imply just the opposite. Then you realize that Phone Guy outright states in his first call that "they don't tell you these things when you sign up." He likely had to find out about their violent behavior without any guidance from a predecessor or any warning from the owners, and so had no idea what was going on whatsoever. The programming excuse was the only thing he could think of to justify their behavior. Since taking this job means that both Phone Guy and the player were likely in desperate need of money ($4 an hour was a bit less than the federal minimum wage in 1993, legal only if it was after federal and local taxes were deducted), Phone Guy needed some sort of reasoning which would help keep him sane through each night, and left the messages for the player so that they would have an understanding of what they were getting into before it was too late to get out.
  • It could also be that Phone Guy wanted to warn the new night guard, but didn't want to frighten him into getting up and leaving (which would leave him even more vulnerable to attack than sitting in the room).
  • Similarly, his request that your character "check inside" the suits on night four might indicate that he knows he's about to die, and is asking you to look for his remains.
  • On the more depressing side, if he recorded all of the messages the night he died, he might have been trying to keep himself calm to avoid thinking of what would happen once his power inevitably ran out.
  • However, it's possible that recording the messages would use up power, so it could be that Phone Guy made a Heroic Sacrifice and used up his power to warn you about the animatronics and give you a better chance of survival.
  • The prequel also gives hints that he is actually a lifelong fan of the Fazbear franchise, which may contribute to his willingness to forgive or ignore the horrors he's witnessed.
  • How was it that the animatronics managed to kill him despite him having survived them for so long, and thus having had plenty of time to learn their behaviours? The answer is exactly that: he spent too long on the job. They learned his strategies and realized that the only possible way that they were going to succeed in taking him out was to work together and Tag Team him.
  • Another point that could be made for his comment that they are not malicious would be that he possibly knows that the suits are possessed by murdered little kids who attack adults they see as authority figures or threatening. He could very well be aware that it's not their fault. Also, there is the theory that these kids were killed by an employee. So they try and kill you (and by extension Phone Guy) because their dead tortured souls can't tell the difference between their attacker and you.
• A possible method to escape getting killed by Freddy after the power goes out is to essentially play dead (i.e. don't move the mouse and remain inactive). While it references Phone Guy's advice about how they might leave you alone for doing so, it's also a common method for dealing with Real Life bear attacks.
  • Youtuber Tech Rules decompiled the game and confirmed that this strategy does not work. Nothing in the game checks to see whether or not you're moving during the lights out section.
  • Phone Guy also says that doing this might make the animatronics think you're an empty suit, and try to stuff a metal endoskeleton into you. "I wonder how that would work..." Come Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location we find out exactly how that would work.

• As the wiki points out; your paycheck is dated November 13th, and November 13, 1987 was a Friday.
• Why does Freddy barely do anything (unless the power goes out) during the first few nights? Considering that he takes advantage of your flaws when he does get active, perhaps he's been studying your strategy the whole time. It's also possible that he's simply looking for a Worthy Opponent, someone who's shown they can't be taken down by the other three. It's likely his tactics (adapting to your strategy, being almost impossible to see on the cameras) would quickly take out the uninitiated, and what fun would that be?
• Some people believe that the management have to be a bunch of jackasses to fire Mike when he "tampers with the electronics", since, realistically, he would turn the AI down to its lowest level to make the place safer at night. However, when you consider how many LetsPlayers go for the Self-Imposed Challenge on level 7 (i.e. the nearly impossible 4-20 mode), it's also possible that the management fired Mike for ratcheting up the AI levels to obscenely high levels just for the "challenge", and nearly risked them rampaging beyond the pizza place if he wasn't able to survive the night.
  • Makes more sense after playing the second game. The bots have facial recognition technology hooked up to the police database to identify targets with criminal records. How do they know you don't have something to hide?
• After the seventh night, the security guard is fired for "tampering with electronics". The real reason you're fired? You were only hired in the first place to keep the robots contained inside instead of rampaging through the surrounding area. Now that you've reprogrammed their AI to make them more docile, you are no longer needed to do that, so they no longer need you. Simply laying you off would require some sort of severance compensation or at least a couple weeks' notice, so it's cheaper to just fire you. They were too cheap to pay to have the animatronics fixed, so now that you've fixed them for free, they're too cheap to reward you with anything but an immediate firing.
  • Either that or they fired you for making the animatronics too docile, to the point that they don't even work during the day like they should. Sure, they can still kill you if you set them all to 0, but that doesn't mean it won't mess them up when they have to work during the day. Maybe that's why they fire you after you "fix" them? You "fix" them to the point that they won't work properly, putting the pizza joint further into bankruptcy, since they might need to fix them again, or won't have enough customers due to the lack of working animatronics.
  • Even without murderous robots to worry about, they'd still need a security guard for the same reason any restaurant would (break-ins, theft, damage to property, etc.) So it would make no sense for them to fire you for that reason.
• Why does Mike keep coming back? Because if he survives each night, which he would have to in order to go back, then all he really knows is that the animatronics are really intent on getting to him. Being warned to keep the bots away could be brushed off as a morbid joke by his predecessor, at least until night 4's message. (Even the hallucinations/visions of Golden Freddy could be excused away as imagination or lack of sleep.) Even so, it's not until night 5 and the terrifying message from Freddy that it's clear that things are 100% not-good.
• Bonnie, unlike Chica, doesn't go from room-to-room in a set pattern, and sometimes appears to teleport from one room to another at times. Why is he so fast? Maybe it's because he's a bunny, and bunnies are known to be quick and light on their feet...
• Why does Foxy’s eyepatch spring up after he barges in? Because Real Life pirates used their eyepatch during raids to get the eye covered accustomed to the dark quickly if they have to go fight in a darker part of the ship, not necessarily to cover a lost eye.
• In the second game, you get paid even less money than in the first. With how dangerous and notorious the restaurant has become, why on God's green earth would management pay less?!...but then, it turns out this game's a prequel! By the time the original FNAF takes place, the Bite of '87 has taken place and the restaurant in the second game is shut down, so if the restaurant had a shitty reputation then, it would be positively wretched now, hence management tossing a couple more pennies to the sad sack stuck in the graveyard shift in the first game.
  • This seems more like Fazbear Entertainment still managing to pass the minimum wage requirement than anything shady, though. In 1987, the minimum wage was $3.35 per hour, and it is logical that it rises to $4 per hour in the first game, which is set several years afterward. They are not going to risk forced closure simply because they are too cheap to pay their employees.
• The lyrics to the tune Freddy plays mention a ‘dark eye watching you’, but Freddy had blue eyes. Then it turns out in the prequel that Freddy originally tried to stop the killer and now he and the other animatronics resent the security guards; it’s quite likely he means that the dark eye is the guard’s, not his, and he and his friends are actually the good guys.
• Back during the first two games, many wondered why Golden Freddy acted like he did, with the odd mannerisms like teleporting around and turning into a floating head, making many assume that he was the murderer, but after the reveals the third game gives us, no wonder he did that. He didn't have a proper endoskeleton, so that was the only thing the child trapped inside of him could do!
• You know the code "395248"? You know, the code that unlocks the minigame with Golden Freddy and Spingtrap? If you look at the code on an actual phone, it draws out a "reverse" sign, meaning that this game probably takes place in the past... most likely the original Fredbear's Diner.
• Here's a reason why the children are trying to kill you, even if they've already killed the killer. At the beginning of each night, no matter which game you're playing, Phone Guy speaks to you. Phone Guy is commonly accused of being the murderer of the children in the suits. And if he is the killer, the angry, restless spirits might interpret Phone Guy's voice as yours, and assume that you, and other security guards, are the murderer, because the main protagonist never speaks. And since Phone Guy talks to you in every game, the spirits will always think this way.
  • Jossed, as Scott Cawthon revealed on a Steam post that Phone Guy is not the murderer.
• In FNaF 4, it is revealed that Fredbear caused the Bite of 87. It is also heavily implied that Golden Freddy and Fredbear are the same. Now, whose jumpscare plays when you put 1-9-8-7 into the Custom Night menu of the original game?
  • Jossed, as Scott Cawthon confirmed that 4 takes place in 1983, and that the custom night menu jumpscare was just to dispel rumors about an easter egg.
• Several of the characters introduced in 4 had artwork that asked the question "Was it me?", referring to the Bite of '87, a mystery that has haunted the series since the first installment. But the biggest clue was there ever since the first entry, in a certain character's catchphrase. Hint: The one that keeps saying "it's me".
• A sort of unintentional meta one — Phone Guy at one point suggests playing dead as a tactic to keep the animatronics from killing you. Playing dead in the sense of 'not doing anything at all' is an integral part of the strategy that Bigbug used to finally defeat 4/20 Mode. It works like this: since the rest of that strategy drains your power very quickly, after you're down to roughly 5%, you just stop doing anything (and desperately hope that Foxy doesn't pay you a visit) to draw out the rest for as long as you can (you won't make it to 6 AM this way, but you will make it far enough that if Freddy decides to take a while before killing you, it might just turn to 6).
• The reveal that Michael Afton might have been every night guard the player controlled in the franchise makes some sense, when you look back at some of the things that happen throughout the franchise, especially taking into account the fact that he gets turned into a walking corpse himself at the end of Sister Location:
  • The reason why playing dead works so well? Actually being a corpse probably helps sell the illusion.
    • This is a myth. Playing dead (outside of Bigbug's strategy for 4/20 mode, which kind of includes a "playing dead" section) doesn't save you from the lights out part. Nothing in the game checks to see if you're moving during that section.
  • The reason why all of the animatronics are out to kill you in every game? Michael has a striking family resemblance to his father William, who is the Purple Guy.
  • The reason why Springtrap's jumpscare doesn't seem as aggressive as the other ones in the franchise? It's a family reunion.
  • Remember back to why Mike Schmidt got fired at the end of the custom night in the first game? "Tampering with the animatronics. General unprofessionalism. Odor." Suddenly, that last one doesn't seem too silly...
    • The first one gives an explanation as to how the player is able to tamper with the animatronics as well, despite being a presumably simple night guard.
  • The reason why Baby initially helps the player during Sister Location? Baby's possessed by Elizabeth Afton, Michael's sister.
• Another reason for the insanely low paycheck, despite it being 1983? Power consumption. Despite you being a night guard, you're using an incredible amount of power throughout your week, which the restaurant has to pay for to get it back up again. It's likely that you're not just using the power in your station either, but for the entire restaurant (remember that you can also turn the lights on in the other rooms. Plus, as you run out of power, the entire place appears to shut off. Not just your station). They probably literally cannot afford you as much as they'd want to. The same probably goes for the other games as well, except for Sister Location, where they purposefully appear to antagonize you.
• This kind of applies to the whole series, but the increasingly unnerving designs for the animatronics makes a bit more sense when you realize who had a big hand in designing a good number of those animatronics. It's not uncommon for dangerous and malevolent people like Afton to have a history of making very unnerving art, intentionally or not.

Fridge Horror

• What financial situation must the protagonist be in to keep going back to his low-paying and dangerous job beyond the 1st night?
  • Maybe he likes it.
  • Or maybe this was the only job he could find and is stuck with it until he finds something better. In addition, he may need the extra cash to support himself.
  • What's worse: maybe he knows the dangers of keeping the job and letting someone else take the job for him. Maybe he's putting his own life on the line?
  • Note that the game heavily features this song, which is all about bullfighting and how the glory involved in it far outweighs the risk of death. If this is any reflection on the protagonist, he could very well be an awesome adrenaline junkie.
    • And don't forget that those playing horror games are there to be scared (maybe for the emotional high), so it could be, say, an addiction or something.
    • The Toreador Song (Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre) becomes slightly more Fridge Horror when you know what the lyrics for the chorus — the only part Freddy plays — translate into:
      Toreador, on guard!
      Toreador! Toreador!
      And think, yes, think well as you fight,
      That a dark eye is watching you,
      And that love waits for you,^note HAH! Freddy has BLUE eyes!
      Toreador, love, love waits for you!
  • Junkies, especially those on crack and Judas, will do anything for the money to get their fix. Their life isn't worth living without it. You're a crack junkie.
  • Or, alternatively, he's on the job because he wants to die, whether it be because of guilt over murdering the children from the backstory or simply being Driven to Suicide by something, whether it had anything to do with the restaurant or not. He just realizes mid-shift that oh, hey, getting shoved into a suit would be excruciatingly painful, he doesn't want to die like that.
  • Later games and material imply that the guard does have some reasons for taking this hellish job. The reasons themselves are pretty distressing.
• The terms of your job. You're not hired to keep people out. You're there as bait to keep Freddy and Friends in.
  • Actually, the former still seems likely. In future games, the Animatronics have facial-recognition designed to detect criminals. So clearly they're at least wary of burglars sneaking in at night. Plus, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for them to hire someone as bait, when they actually do need security guards — considering the fact that they're still a restaurant.
• The Bite of '87. According to Phone Guy, one of the animatronics bit someone's frontal lobe and the victim may have lived from it. How sharp do an animatronic's teeth need to be to pull that off?!
  • It's not the sharpness of the teeth that you need to worry about. Rather, it's the amount of force the animatronics can bite down with. This is known as the "bite force", and it's measured in pounds per square inch (or PSI). We humans only have a bite force of around 200 pounds PSI. On the other extreme, the Tyrannosaurus rex was estimated to have a bite force of around 12,000 pounds PSI. Now, let's take into consideration a few things. First, the animatronics are far bigger than human beings (taking up nearly an entire doorway), meaning they'd have an easy time fitting a full-sized human head into their mouths (a child's head would fit in their mouths even easier). Now, take into consideration that these are machines we're talking about. It's quite possible that for their size, they are able to exert a tremendous amount of force and are faster and stronger than the average human. With that in mind, we can estimate that the animatronics are capable of biting down with enough pressure to crack through bone. In other words, the victim that lost their frontal lobe during The Bite Of '87 didn't just have something slice through their brain. Their skull was basically crushed/cracked open like an egg. Yeah, let that image sink in for a moment.
    • Look at Bonnie backstage. Imagine a human standing in that doorway. Now look at the size of Bonnie in comparison. These animatronics are huge. Moreover, check out the size and elevation of Bonnie's mouth. Yeah, the Bite of '87 probably happened just because someone wasn't watching where they were walking.
  • It's possible that it was Foxy that did bite someone, as he actually has sharp teeth and Pirate Cove is closed, making it plausible that they just covered up the area and left Foxy to rot (he's in a state of disrepair), though one has to ask: Why didn't they turn Foxy off after that?
    • As the sequel shows, simply turning off the animatronics doesn't prevent them from walking around at night.
  • FNAF2 shows Mangle, meant to replace Foxy. As such, The Mangle has a design based off him, teeth and all. At that time, however, Foxy's been scrapped for the time being. Onto that note, Mangle actually has a reason if she was responsible.
    • The Mangle theory is further supported by her attack. She clearly bites the player and it seems to be aimed at the forehead, which would include the frontal lobe.
    • The fourth game finally reveals what truly happened. Neither Foxy, Chica, Bonnie, Freddy, or Mangle was responsible at all. The child protagonist was forced into Golden Freddy's mechanical jaws during his very own birthday party, no less, as part of a stupid prank by his older brother and his friends...which went horribly, horribly, wrong.
    • Actually, this is a common misunderstanding of the fourth game. That wasn't the infamous Bite of '87. That was the springlock suit failure that put springtrap Bonnie and Fredbear out of commission and sealed up also the fourth game takes place in 1983 four years earlier. We still have NO IDEA who was responsible for the bite of '87.
    • It actually wasn't the springlock failure. While 4 does take place in 1983, the springlock failure is when the coils inside the animatronic that turn it into "suit mode" fail, like what we see happen to Purple Guy in 3.
    • Keep in mind that this is just a fan theory. We can’t be sure if that ‘Fazbear and friends’ show was RECORDED in 1983, or if it was on air, or founded, or something else SINCE 1983. It’s still likely that this is the bite of ‘8.
    • Scott Cawthon confirmed that 4 takes place in 1983, not 1987.
• Nowadays, it's nearly impossible to not know about Foxy before playing the game due to him being such an Ensemble Dark Horse and how active the fandom is. But In-Universe, Mike and other guards aren't informed about him until the second night. It may seem odd, even cruel, that Phone Guy didn't do that earlier, until you realize that it may because he found out on the second night himself, and couldn't add the info in the first call. Which means that, especially if one played the game before Foxy became so well-known, you may had survived the first night by sheer luck. Just how many unlucky guards thought they got a handle on the situation on the first night, only to learn to learn the hard way that there's a fourth animatronic? It suddenly makes sense on why Scott kept him a secret at first...
• For 'free-roaming' animatronics, they seem to specifically be coming for you. This could be Freddy's doing, but if you look closely (or at high-resolution stills ripped from the files without the camera effects on top), you'll notice that Chica, when on the stage at the very beginning of the night, is holding a similar cupcake to the one in your office. Both of them have eyes like the machines. Maybe that's how Freddy's observing your tactics...
• One of the altered posters features this quote:
  "These characters will live on. In the hearts of kids, these characters will live on." -CEO

And what was the most significant event in the game's story?

• At one point in the game, Phone Guy suggests simply playing dead to trick the animatronics into thinking you're an empty costume. He then points out that might just make them try to shove an endoskeleton into you and wonders how that would work. Now, take into consideration that the costumes are put on by inserting an animatronic into an opening in the back. And, the only opening we humans have in the back is... oh, good god...
• Night Seven of the game reveals that Mike Schmidt got fired for tampering with the robot's A.I. Also, it's revealed towards the end of the game that the restaurant is scheduled to be shut down due to health code violations. This seems to be a good thing at first. Until you consider that Mike (and the other security guards before him) were there to keep the animatronics in and not keep out intruders. And, it seems unlikely that there'll be any new security guards being hired afterwards. So, what's to keep Freddy and his pals from escaping and wreaking havoc on innocent civilians? Not to mention there are already plans for a sequel.
  • If Fazbear Entertainment follows procedure similar to Chuck E. Cheese or Pizza Time Theater does in the real world, any decommissioned animatronics are refitted into other characters, dismantled for parts, or destroyed on-site. This is still fridge horror, however, because now the tortured spirits of the murdered children are inhabiting potentially hundreds of unjoined, immobile robot parts.
    • The end of the third game shows us if the haunted chassis is destroyed, the trapped spirit is freed, so no worries there at least — the dead kids are fine.
  • Mind you, this game does seem to take place in America. Freddy and his band may be tough and ambiguously haunted robots, but being greeted by a panicky homeowner with a shotgun/assault rifle/hunting rifle as they tap on his windows would still cause them a lot of trouble.
    • Of course, however, it seems the only way to properly damage the animatronics would be to damage the endoskeleton. Even a shotgun would just go through the costume unless the costume gets penetrated enough. The home owners would probably realize that after the shotgun shells do no damage at all, they'll be doomed.
    • I'm pretty sure a simple metal endoskeleton isn't going to just shrug off 12-gauge buckshot...
• As someone else pointed out, the reason why you were fired might have been because you made the robots more docile and easier to control, so they no longer need to pay you to keep an eye on them. But it's no fun to make the robots easier to deal with, is it?
• The player's shift runs from midnight to 6 A.M., but family-style pizza parlors don't stay open past 9 P.M. How many guards on the shift before Mike have perished in that room?
  • I think it says somewhere that the animatronics only become hostile at midnight, so they're safe on that end.
  • Besides, 9 P.M. is just close of trade. Ask anyone who's worked in a restaurant, it can take much longer to clean the place up after the customers are gone. Between cleaning a commercial kitchen (while Freddy's has had sanitation complaints, they all seem to be leveled at the gory animatronics, not the food service) and the fact the dining room, which hosts a bunch of kids, is impeccable every night, there could easily be three hours of cleaning before the last one out the door at midnight lets the nightwatchman in.
    • Wouldn't the restaurant have closed before 9 P.M.? One of the Rules For Safety is "Leave before dark."◊
    • That could just be general advice for customers, especially if Freddy's is located in a scummy part of town where (Fridge Brilliance in itself) nobody who happened to be nearby after dark would report bloodcurdling screams. Given the management is desperately trying to turn a profit and already pays its employees peanuts, they might stay open as long as possible to get any scrap of business.
    • "Before dark" Could just refer to before the pizzeria closes for the night, and presumably turns the lights off. Y'know, since the animatronics roam around the building after it closes.
    • Plus, the only person there is the night watch who's probably got his own problems, so you wouldn't want to stay after dark. Especially with ghosts haunting the murderous robots who happen to like stuffing people into suits if they don't chew you out for being there.
• For Phone Guy to know what happens to you if you're caught by the animatronics, he must have seen it happen to someone else.
• While the Game Over screen is horrifying in itself, look into the Freddy Fazbear heads when Bonnie is backstage. There is what looks like human eyeballs in the empty huge eye sockets of the head. Was this what remains of Phone Guy or another guard? How could none of the employees have seen it? Where is the rest of his or her body?
  • This troper is fairly certain that they're just Freddy's animatronic eyes, after close examination. Plus, in the Game Over screen, your eyes are dangling out of the sockets, unlike the Freddy head's.
• The management clearly know what is going on in the restaurant if they established very specific rules on what you should do if a guard going missing, not touching Freddy, still keeping Foxy and possibly the Golden Freddy costume somewhere, for some reason not checking the suits for the missing children's bodies, and the Bite of '87. Are the managers the true Big Bad here? They certainly seem to be intentionally keeping the bots around for something malicious. Why would they be so concerned with keeping the place opened if it quite clear there is something very wrong with the entertainment robots?
  • Could also be that the management is too dumb to notice what's going on? Or maybe so stressed about the place closing down that they just don't take notice of the possibility that the animatronics are causing trouble to the night guards?
    • What if the Purple Man is actually the Manager?!
    • You're actually right there, since FNAF: Sister Location confirms it.
• You're fired after Night 7 for tampering with the animatronics, even if you didn't. This could easily be construed as the owners realizing you're too tough to crack, so it's time to bring in a fresh face...
  • If you subscribe to the idea that he's there as bait for the animatronics, this doesn't make sense, though. What better bait than bait that is smart enough to keep itself alive?
    • The animatronics get worse as you progress through the week. What if they get frustrated? What if the free Sunday isn't enough to "calm them down" completely? What if they also get slowly worse every week you work there?
    • Think you hit the nail on the head there. The animatronics might be getting increasingly frustrated the same way an alcoholic would if they went longer periods without booze, with the owners worried what lengths they might go to without some means of getting their "fix" in easy reach. Mike isn't just there as bait. He's there as a sacrifice!
    • But it's the Custom Night. Now, a sensible person would set all A.I.s to 0...but then, a LOT of people decide to tackle 4/20 mode instead. Why would you turn already-homicidal animatronics into Terminators for FUN?
• Since the pizza place is closing down, what will happen to the haunted animatronics?
  • Being recycled, perhaps?
  • Answered by the the third game. They were left to rot because nobody had the guts to set foot on the haunted property afterwards, and the killings were already a popular urban legend...at least not until Fazbear's Fright came in and tried to salvage their remains. What little was left went up in flames as the new establishment burnt down overnight...except for Springtrap...
• The duration of your night shift. 12 AM - 6 AM. Think about it. Sure, the game speeds up time and only makes it feel like 6 minutes have passed each night you work there, but that's not the case for Mike. What feels like 6 distressing minutes to you is six grueling hours of fighting for his life for Mike. That's the amount of time that you are usually in school. Imagine how Mike feels spending six long hours in that little room every night. What you feel when you play is actually 36 times longer for Mike and the other security guards. Let that sink in.
  • In the same vein of things that are bad for us but worse in-universe, when one of the doors is tampered with and no longer works. To us, it means game over and we should probably brace for a jump scare. For Mike, it means he's got approximately ten seconds left to live before his brutal murder starts and can do nothing during those ten seconds but contemplate this.
  • Note, however, that this could also mean that he has more time to react on threats. So this fridge horror might turn into fridge hope: it means that the mortality rate is lower than assumed. All the reaction time in the world doesn't help you if your energy runs out... which is why the previous guard died, another point that supports this fringe hope. So it can be assumed that all the guards that were not caught off guard the first day survived until energy economics became hard... (heck, Phone Guy might have only been the first guard, perhaps one of a pair and someone who has seen the other getting shoved in the suit...)
• The teaser image for the second game appears to be from the viewpoint of a Freddy Fazbear suit as Foxy approaches is bad enough. Then you remember the robots' preferred way of killing, and the possible implications become worse.
  • Fortunately, it was just a teaser for the mask disguise mechanic.
• Phone Guy tells us that the animatronics just think you're an endoskeleton. Fair enough. Yet one room shows various parts of the costumes... and an endoskeleton. And Bonnie, who can be seen in the room, is just staring at you. (Sometimes right in front of the camera, which looks terrifying.) This implies that something more sinister is going on...and four games later, we still don't know what it is.
  • But there was an Endoskeleton in FNAF 2, and it was actually a harmless, Helpful Mook...
• You know, a pizzeria with urban legends of murder and death, will always attract thrill-seeking teens (Like the kind you see in every horror movie) to sneak in and spend the night. Makes one wonder, how many have tried that? Or will in the future?
• Is Freddy Fazbear's Pizza a chain of restaurants instead of just one? If so, do the other restaurants have animatronics? If so, do they "malfunction" too? If so, how many people have perished at their paws/wings/hooks?
  • Confirmed to have at least more than one establishment by the end of the third game, so it's highly possible we'll see more animatronics in the future. Given the fourth game's teaser images… the mind has a lot to think about how the Nightmare looks came to be.
• In the first game, the news poster would occasionally indicate that Freddy's was due for closing. The second game takes place before the first, and ends with Freddy's closing down and the animatronics being given to a new location. That means that the newspaper must have been referring to the Freddy's in the second game. The Freddy's from the first game is still open.
  • Except the closing of the second game's pizza place happened very shortly after the murders became known; the newspaper article in the first game says that the closing it's talking about happened after many years of bad PR caused by the murders. They are two different closings.
  • So, apparently 3 is going to take place 30 years later. Which means the animatronics are still around. Which means we have the most ridiculous, spectacular instance of Karma Houdini in a horror story, ever, on our hands. Joy.
  • Oh wait, it's just set in a horror attraction… and it's stated that the Pizzeria was abandoned. No Karma Houdini for the management.
• If Golden Freddy is just an empty suit, how does it move around?
  • And furthermore, if it really was the suit used by the murderer, who seemed to only target children, why is it attacking you?
    • Perhaps it's a case of Child Labor?
    • The animatronics are out to build a child nation in a One of Us fashion, explaining why they pass over the naked exoskeleton in the backstage/repair room.
    • Well, in the fourth game, Golden Freddy/Fredbear pulled off the Bite of '87 by accident, the third game shows the murderer used Springtrap instead and the second game shows a fifth child might have been placed in it, too. But as Fredbear almost certainly ended his career as a hybrid spring suit, as he was in animatronic mode when the Bite happened, the company could have taken his endoskeleton away, redesigned him to look like the new Freddy, and kept him as just a spare suit for employees to wear without getting crushed.
    • Except that that wasn't the Bite of '87. The fourth game takes place four years earlier in 1983.
    • Except that that is not actually confirmed in any way. The date on the TV could simply be a rerun or a videogame (Atari/Nintendo games normally feature the dates in their intros.) Also, everything that happened in the bite shown to us in FNAF 4 seems to match the description Phone Guy gave of the bite of '87.
    • Except that Scott confirmed that it takes place in 1983.
    • Nightmare Fredbear has a mouth on his stomach. This might be because he was a spring-lock suit. Maybe the kid seen an employee getting dressed and the torso and the legs might separate to allow the person to climb inside. That said, Nightmare has a human brain... maybe Nightmare represents Fredbear while be worn by a person rather than an endoskeleton. The kid was obviously afraid of the Fredbears in the restaurant (the one on stage and the one being worn for some reason.
• The fact that both this and FNAF 2 show (or at the very least heavily imply) that the animatronics (possessed or not) are self-aware. Not that scary, right? Well, think about this for a moment. If they are simply malfunctioning robots, someone would've had to been able to program them to be sentient. If they are possessed/haunted, the spirits of the murdered children likely granted them sentience (or made them more self-aware beyond what their programming was capable of). Now, imagine keeping an eye on something that not only wants to kill you (via stuffing you in a suit) but also happens to be aware that you are watching their every move. Also, FNAF 2 being a prequel features the "SAVE THEM" mini-game if you get a game-over which implies that Freddy tried to save the murdered children. Ok, now take into consideration how determined he is to get you by watching your movements the first few nights of the game. Freddy isn't just mindlessly following the same programming night after night. He's learning from his interactions with the various night guards. So, let me ask one last question. Now that Five Nights At Freddy's 3 has been confirmed, how long until he figures out how to take out the night shift preemptively?
  • Well, he sort of can't anymore, due to having the pizzeria shut down.
• Occasionally, you can hear circus music playing in the background for no reason. This could just be for creepiness, but look at the drawings on the walls; there's a gift box. And when Bonnie or Chica jumpscare you, you might be able to see the reflection of a ceiling door. Now, what animatronic can be controlled by music? What animatronic pops out of a gift box? What animatronic flies down from the ceiling to kill you? What was already almost outright stated to still be around when this game takes place? The Marionette. Even worse, a ceiling door was found in the office.
  • Listen closely when you switch to the camera in the dining room and you’ll start hearing faint circus-like music playing in the background. Knowing the Marionette’s behavior, that may have been the only thing placating it from murdering you on the spot.
  • Also, what are all those random banging sounds that come out of nowhere? You know, the ones that aren’t caused by Foxy attacking the left door. Perhaps the Marionette was trying to get out?
    • What banging sounds? The timestamp in your link clearly says "Footsteps" which is the sound that plays when an animatronic is close to your door.
  • One of the drawings on the wall in the office is a drawing of Bonnie popping out of a box that looks exactly like the Marionette’s. If the box is still around, then it’s likely the Marionette is still there too.
• The method that the animatronics use to kill the night guards. As the kids were murdered, each of their bodies were stuffed into suits. Their way of killing night guards is also by stuffing them into suits. The animatronics aren't stuffing you into a suit because of their programming. It's because the children themselves are invoking Death by Irony.
• At the end of the Custom Night, Mike will still get fired, partially for tampering with the animatronics, even if they are left on their default AI settings. Could this mean that (in at least one possible outcome) the company that runs Freddy's is deliberately lying about their reasons for firing Mike? It adds fuel to the fire when you realize the management in the rest of the game proper hasn't been the most morally sound one... Or perhaps, did something or someone else jack up their AI just before Night 7?
  • The "default settings" are 0/0/0/0, but Custom Night is Night 7, and Phone Guy clearly states that the animatronics get more aggressive as the week progresses, which would mean those aren't the actual default.
• Phone Guy specifically says that the management does not tell new employees about the animatronics'... quirks. Could you imagine being one of the employees stuck in your security job without Phone Guy's warnings about the animatronics (or who muted his phone call, which you have the option of doing)? Watching the cameras and gradually realizing the animatronics are actually moving and headed straight toward you?
  • Expanding upon this, imagine working the night shift and suddenly seeing the animatronics move around. What would be the most logical reaction? Most people wouldn't react with horror or have their survival instincts suddenly kicking in. Most people would likely be struck with confusion and leave the office just to check what the animatronics are doing off the stage after closing hours and if there's any way of talking them into returning to the stage. The Surprisingly Sudden Death would be all but ensured...
• The fact the animatronics can disable the cameras and light sources at all. Yeah, that's not exactly normal for bots that are simply roaming the building for the heck of it. This also leads to a rather terrifying thought: whenever they catch you, the camera fizzes out. Does that mean the robots completely disable the camera feeds so they can kill you in private?
  • Yet, most of the time, they don't disable the camera, even if they're looking right at it. It seems like they want you to know they're coming...
• Mike's first check said, "(See you next week)". Now we all know Mike gets fired for messing with the AI in the Custom Night, but just think about if he didn't. How many weeks would he have to endure the terror of Freddy's before some kind of intervention? Who knows, perhaps he would've met the same fate as Phone Guy.

Fridge Logic

• Phone Guy states that the animatronics likely see you as an endoskeleton without a costume on, and try to "fix" that themselves. So, why doesn't Mike just wear an empty costume? This, of course, assumes a number of things: that he can find/adapt one, that the animatronics actually think like that, that this can actually fool them, and that the management won't fire him for it. (All the more reason to do so, frankly.)
  • The reason why this wouldn't work is that, as Phone Guy mentions on Night 3, if the animatronics see Mike as an empty costume, they would attempt to stick a robotic endoskeleton INSIDE you.
    • Phone Guy's suggestion specifically calls for going limp and playing dead to make the empty costume impression come across. If Mike moves around in the costume, there should be no reason for them to think he was empty, and he'd clearly have the suit on, so he shouldn't be breaking any rules.
  • During one of the nights, you can see a room with a naked endoskeleton. And yes, if one of the animatrons enter the room, they will not care about it not having a costume on. So yeah... seems like they just hate you...
    • The reason they leave that skeleton alone could be that it's in the backroom, which logically would be like a changing room. They stuff you into a suit if they find you because you're in the office. Though that still doesn't explain why they focus on the office at all.
  • We get the proper answer in the second game: They tried that already, by giving the guard a mask to wear. Didn't end up working out, it seems.
  • Unlike the Springlock suits, we have no reason to assume that the empty costumes in the FNAF 1 location can be worn by a human. Especially since getting put inside one is how Mike dies.
• No matter how you look at it, it doesn't make sense for the security doors to be open by default.
  • Well, there's a fan inside the security room that's always on during all the nights, so the room probably gets hot as well. To make sure that it isn't incredibly hot (if you've ever worked in a tiny room with a lot of electronics, it can get hot...) they leave the doors open by default. Add that the owners either don't know or don't care about the whole "murderous animatronics" problem, it seems kinda sensible to leave the doors open like that, and only have an emergency shutter for the door. Although, this may or may not explain why the doors open when power runs out...
    • Likely, the doors use magnetic locks, which are kept up by default and open when the power goes off in order to prevent people from being trapped in the room. It doesn't particularly help you, of course.
  • It is a legal requirement that any door which requires power to unlock or open must enter the unlocked or opened state upon loss of power, or have a mechanical means of opening the door. In normal usage cases (that is, there aren't rampaging, haunted, homicidal animatronics), you don't want to be trapped inside a room when a fire knocks out the power, do you? The doors come down from the ceiling and appear to be heavy, so no mechanical means could be provided for opening the doors without power, therefor they must be built such that they are open (perhaps held up by springs or the like) without power, but when provided with power they provide a force against the springs to hold the door closed. Which would be why they require power to remain closed. So whoever installed those doors likely followed building code. The question is, who would pay for freaking blast doors for their office when simple swinging doors would usually suffice?
    • A standard metal door costs $200, electronic deadbolts cost around $100, and a 50 PSI blast door costs around $5,000. And that's one that swings open, not one that comes down from the ceiling like in the games. And when you consider installation costs, it probably would've been smarter to just not even install doors in the first place if they're worried about the animatronics breaking the doors off their hinges.
    • They removed the door in the second game... but of course, that didn't work out well either.
• How can someone have only their eyes and teeth left after getting shoved into the animatronic suit? Deep cuts all over the place, sure — as a matter of fact, one’s eyes would get scratched out too — but the fate described and showed in the standard game over makes no sense.
  • If you pay more attention, the phone guy doesn't say "nothing will be left of your body except your eyes and teeth", he says "only parts of you that would likely see the light of day are your eyeballs and teeth". This, along with the fact that your eyes are still connected to the suit in the game over screen, implies that your body is actually inside the suit (dead or dying, of course), not destroyed by the suit, so it makes perfect sense. (Your body, then, is either removed from the suit by the company, which also washes the suit, as per the terms of agreement, or disappears due to paranormal activity, if the suits are haunted and the ghosts bother.)
• After the custom night, Mike is fired for, among other things, "odor." Most people chalk that up to him urinating or defecating in fear from the jump scares, but remember those only happen when he's about to be stuffed into a suit and killed. The real reason? There's no place to do his business in the guard room, and the restrooms are down the hall. This being a six hour shift, he would have to go to the restroom at some point. He can't leave the guard room to relieve himself or else he risks being caught and killed.
  • Some folks can hold it in that long (and most people do just that when they sleep). When a person is sufficiently frightened, the body can begin prioritizing certain things over others. This is why some people relieve themselves when they're scared: the body is putting more effort into things like being able to run a bit longer or detecting movement, and skips over holding in urine or feces if the need to go is eminent. This doesn't necessarily have to be in response to a sudden stimulus like a jump scare; sustained fear and stress can do the same thing. The trouble with both possibilities — sustained fear or just a reluctance to leave the safety of the office — is the obvious question of why Mike didn't just bring a bottle or something after the first night if he knew that was likely to happen.
• Many people would think a security guard, even on night shift, would get some sort of gun or similar, especially since the animatronics are KNOWN to walk at night and try to kill the guards. Remember, though, that this is a kid-friendly restaurant, and they desperately want to keep their image as such intact. They cannot let a security guard, even on night shift, be seen having a real weapon.
  • Different troper here, and the other reason you can't defend yourself is because you would need a lot more firepower than a pistol provides.
• Freddy's has several robots that get up at night and, essentially, patrol the restaurant. They are rather efficient at catching people, and they do it for free. Their inherent creepiness acts as a good deterrent for potential intruders, and anyone who intrudes anyway gets killsmercized. What do they need a guard for?
  • To keep the animatronics in.
  • Or to prevent any intruders from being killed. You have a security camera that lets you view every room in the place, even the bathrooms and freaking supply closet, and considering how you have both doors and windows on either side of you (as well as two security cameras, one aimed at a corner for seemingly no reason), those could be so you can see if anyone has entered the building before the animatronics do. From a business standpoint, would you rather have a video of a seemingly-cranky guard yelling at teenagers to leave put up on whatever form of Youtube they have or photographic proof of killer robots allowed to simply wander around at night and doing horrific things to said teenagers?
    • Who would want to sneak into a cheap, supposedly haunted restaurant with ugly, horrifying animatronics?
    • Apparently the Purple Guy come Five Nights 3...
    • Nobody BUT the former killer would want to sneak into a dilapidated Chuck.E.Cheese's ripoff to rob it, especially since it's repeatedly stated that it's losing money. Not to mention the fact it CAN'T be to keep the animatronics in because more often than not, YOU are hiding from THEM. You're not gonna keep the animatronics from just going for the door if they want to! They don't care about escaping! They just wanna kill all night guards.
    • Well, dumb kids are kinda known for going into supposedly haunted places to prove they aren't scared. There are plenty of people who might break into a supposedly haunted pizza place after hours for reasons other than to rob it.
    • Except the second game's "Give Cake" minigame shows the robots can't leave the restaurant, or Freddy would have been able to get to the kid and the Purple Guy in the car. The third game further confirms that the animatronics can't go anywhere they're not programmed to recognize, like the secret employee rooms. Therefore, it makes the most sense that a business with valuable assets (like robots that can walk on their own, for example... considering the technology and the timeline, those are VERY valuable items), it makes sense, from a business perspective, to have a security guard and cameras to prove to any insurance companies that they've done what they can do to protect their valuable assets in the event one or more of them are stolen.
    • Okay, that's fair, but then why the fiddly fuzzidy uck is the office a place they are programmed to recognize? Why not make it a place they can't fricken see?
    • Well, if you consider the possibility that the members of the company are a bunch of Sadists who enjoy watching Cold-Blooded Torture...
    • Alternatively, because the last time Freddy's gave employees a room the robots didn't recognize, several children died.

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