Game Theory: FNAF, Did Fazbear REALLY Steal Everything?

Everything we've known about FNAF was a lie. Or was it? On the surface, it seems like our old favorites, William and Henry, didn't actually create anything, and instead just stole it all from newcomer Edwin Murray. But how much of that is really true?

And what if I told you, theorists, the answer is entirely up to you. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, and welcome to our fourth and final episode in our Secret of the Mimic extravaganza. It has been a wild ride, loyal theorists. We've uncovered the truth about the Murray family timeline, we've solved the mystery of mexes, and we've managed to figure out secrets of a previously suspected mimic, Sun and Moon.

But the biggest question that I have yet to solve and the main question I had going into this game wasn't about the mimic, or Edwin Murray, or Security Breach. I wanted to know the truth about the origins of Fazbear Entertainment. William and Henry. These two characters we've known about since the beginning and yet So very little about where did they start? How did they create this Empire? Who were they really but friends nothing and I mean nothing

Could have prepared me or the rest of the internet for what we were about to witness witness. To be fair, that reaction was several hours into stream, where all we'd witnessed so far was invention after invention that we thought had been a Fazbear invention for years now, only to discover that Edwin made it. Like the Data Diver, a device used to access certain points around Murray's Costume Manor that looks an awful lot like the FazWrench we use in Ruin. Or what about the massive list of characters?

Tappy Frog, Mr. Hippo, Orville, Monty, Roxy, Moon, Foxy, Chica, Music Man, Helpy, even the wet floor butts from Security Breach share similarities to the Kleenovac. They're all here in Murray's Costume Manor, with designs, schematics and costumes strewn around the facility. Edwin and his wife Fiona designed them all. It felt like everything we'd known over the last decade had been a complete lie. It was never William and Henry, it had all been Edwin. Or had it?

See, while at first it definitely reads that way, there are clues hiding in voice memos, text logs, and just in the physical designs themselves that show us the truth is a little more nuanced. So, let's jump into our unfinished helpful carts, friends, because we've gotta get to the bottom of this and figure out whether William and Henry invented anything or whether they are just complete Frauds first off there is one important thing we have to clarify did William and Henry actually steal Edwin's

inventions and the short answer is No, I've mentioned in a past few theories little tidbits of information about this But while it was clear Fazbear had some shady business practices and were actively stealing employees trying to obtain company secrets, which is not totally legal, they never actually stole Edwin's intellectual property. Edwin was a contractor, and so they would have contracted him to make stuff for them, like the demo of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza that we see in the R&D department, and

that whole process would have included contracts that decided ownership, which we sadly never get to see. I can tell you though, as a former contractor myself, typically those contracts favour the client, the person who came to you to be a contractor. When I would shoot or edit a video for someone, that would then go back to them and they would own the final product. I didn't own anything. But what about Chica, who was made for Chica's Party World, not Fazbear? Or Roxy and Foxy,

who were built for Edwin's TV show idea? Those were definitely Edwin's, and Fazbear surely had no rights to them. Well, until they did. One of the text logs you can obtain is from Willy A himself, and while the message is cut off a bit at the start, the intention is very clear. Quote, Software development and the entire MCM catalog. We would love to keep you on as a lead engineer. Although we now technically own the land, we would never touch the house your parents

built. Afton was offering Edwin a position at Fazbear, because he had just bought MCM, its remaining employees, the ground it's built on, and most importantly, its catalogue of characters and inventions. Fazbear now owned everything. They never stole it from Edwin, they just stole all his employees, drove the business into the ground, and then bought the rights so that they could claim it as

their own.

But let's be honest here, that's kind of a small nitpick in this whole thing. The real issue here is that we believed Henry and William were these great inventors and yet it seems like they just kind of bought everything and didn't make any of it themselves. How could Henry claim

Trapped in prisons of my making

If they weren't his making at all. So let's take a look and try to clear things up. Henry may not be the originator of most of the characters we've attributed to him over the years, RIP Chica was Henry's first theory, but that doesn't mean he didn't invent any characters. From the minute you step into Murray's Costume Manor, you will find one item that appears everywhere in the facility. Pizza boxes from Fredbear's Family Diner. Now, while we are visiting MCM, the place has been abandoned for a bit, but what that means is that while the place was active,

so was Fredbear's Diner, which makes sense given Fazbear Entertainment was a thing and had the means to buy MCM in the first place. They need some way to make money. We also see Fredbear and Spring Bonnie on a number of posters throughout the place,

identical to the ones we found in Security Breach. But notice what we DON'T see throughout MCM. Despite promoting posters for the characters of Fredbears, we never see VERSIONS of Fredbear or Bonnie within the main facility. And that is because of this line. For Edwin to be able to say that, he would have to own the rights to the characters. But the fact that Bonnie and Freddy are missing implies that those two characters were not created and owned by Edwin, but instead William and Henry. Edwin has posters on the walls because there's

clearly a long-standing relationship between the two companies and based on his audio log telling us that they should just hire some teens to wear the suits like we always do. it seems like he has worked on the diner in some way. So the posters are just him promoting himself, going, hey, you know this successful franchise? Well, I helped make that. But he can't show any of the costumes or animatronics for Fredbear and Bonnie because he doesn't own the rights. They were created and owned by William and Henry. So nice big tick for them there.

But that leads us into the big discussion around Fazzbear. Did Edwin invent the Springlocks? Before this point, we've been under the impression that it was Henry who invented the Springlocks, as during the Silver Eyes trilogy, we're pretty much told that outright. Quote, these are Springlocks. One of the first ones Henry made. But now in Secret of the Mimic, we see plenty of Springlock suits.

We see messages about Edwin making them, and we even get to travel around inside them, which is kinda horrifying. However, there is one big detail that stands out pretty quickly, which made me reconsider whether this was another acquired contraption. The fact that we cannot be killed by the Springlocks. Springlock suits are notoriously finicky, causing fatal injury at the first sign of sudden movement or water and yet we managed to fall through an entire floor and yet sustain No injuries. It's almost as if they have not the same kind of spring locks and that is exactly the case

We receive a text log from Edwin during the game that specifically talks about Updating the spring locks to sustain water damage and be okay there's also the facts that the original Springlocks were designed to be both suit and animatronic, while the new ones seem to only really be suits. And finally, the versions of Fredbear and Spring Bonnie down in the R&D department, while looking somewhat like the versions we know, have coloured exoskeletons made of metal, rather than the felt-based material that would stain and discolour like we know from modern Springtrap. And to top that off, there's an audio log in the same area that talks about Springlocks

being used for a long time before this moment. The fact that there have been Springlocks used for Hen, while these new improved metal versions of the Springlocks for Fredbear and Springbunny currently only exist down here in the facility, it tells us that there are other Spring-locked versions of these characters in existence, felt-based ones that use the old, water-damage-prone designs. So that's it. Case closed. Edwin made the new Spring-locks, but Henry can still have

made the originals. Right? Well, I really wanted that to be true. Believe me, I did. But when Ash and I went back to find all the secrets on GT Live, we discovered this message on one of the Mrs. Helpfuls to Edwin from Fiona. Fiona is worried about Edwin's springlock designs and the one her team member was wearing does end up having an issue with water damage. It's almost like that text look we read earlier was a response to Fiona's request to check out the problems, because Edwin was

involved in the creation of the original designs. This isn't the only time Fiona is worried about Edwin rushing out designs that later cause problems either. This is a pattern of behaviour for Edwin. He sprints through dozens of projects, moving on to the next one so fast that his previous invention isn't fully finished, leading to a bunch of failures and returns like we see in the text logs. And so, the idea that these Springlocks suits that were incredibly dangerous and faulty were also Edwin's creations actually makes a lot of sense for his character.

And yes, there is a chance that the original Springlocks were potentially a collaboration between both Henry and Edwin, but right now now I'm just not sure the evidence is there. The books say that Henry was the inventor of the springlocks But that's a very different continuity. The games have never made that claim. The closest we get is Prisons of my making. But here Henry is talking about the normal animatronics, the ones that Edwin never finished And so you could plausibly say that Henry was the one who made them. Edwin did say that Henry was the one changing the designs, but he never mentioned Springlock's.

That doesn't make this a retcon, it's just a realigning of our understanding between the different continuities of these characters, which is basically what Secret of the Mimic did with all of the book continuities. In the novel trilogy, Henry made the Springlocks, but in the games, it was Edwin. Who knows, maybe it'll turn out to be Afton in the movies. But thanks to the company failing, and Edwin's old designs, so I guess you could say that it was karma that got Afton in the end.

In more ways than one. And speaking of good old Willy A, what did he actually do? I mean, we've always known he's a bit of a scumbag, so I don't think his lack of inventions would be all that surprising. But just like I think we can still credit Henry with the creation of the normal animatronics, I think there are a couple of things Afton can be credited with creating himself. Namely, the Funtime animatronics and the scoop. In Sister Location and Pizzeria Simulator, we found

blueprints for these devices and they all have copyrights attributed to Afton Robotics. Of course, we know that Foxy isn't his OC, that one firmly belongs to Edwin and Fiona, and the whole stomach hatch design definitely borrows from Edwin's Springlock designs. But the animatronic part? The weird, wiry bodies? We don't see anything like that from Edwin. The scoop also, of course, bears resemblance to the Springlock crane that we find in MCM and that we then saw in Ruin. They have the ability to scoop something out of a costume

or Springlock suit or whatever. But all the stuff about remnant injection and storage? That's all Afton maybe. Which means at this point we're pretty even. Edwin did make a lot of stuff that we thought were Henry and William, but that doesn't mean they were completely incompetent or unable to make stuff themselves. However, there is one more thing that we need to discuss. One more invention that, if it was claimed by Afton, could affect the entire timeline as we know it. You see, everyone, and I mean everyone who played this game

or watched someone else play it, have been very quick to point out the similarities between David Murray and Afton's son, the Crying Child. The most obvious similarity is their name. Thanks to a friend of the channel, HyperDroid, and a handful of other theorists, last year we came to the conclusion that Crying Child's real name was

also David. David Afton. But there's so much more to it than just a name. Their bedrooms look almost identical and both of those bedrooms are in houses on top of a hill near a tree and near their father's work. They're both missing mother figures in their lives with fathers who spend too much time working. One of the collectibles we get is David Murray's purple plastic telephone, the same one we see in David Afton's bedroom along with a bunch of OTHER similar toys. David Afton is famously scared of Foxy, having ripped off the head of the Foxy plushie and his brother Michael bullying him wearing a Foxy mask. David Murray also is afraid of the pirate

fox, crying when Edwin uses one of the Foxy hand puppets on his first birthday. Both of them even have a birthday party for them coming up on a Saturday, only for them to die on that same birthday. Everything about these two feels identical to a strange degree, almost as if they're the same person. But obviously, as I've mentioned, David Murray is dead, so they cannot physically be the same person. But you know who is still alive and kicking? The thing that was created to become David Murray, M2.

And this is where we hit an interesting fork in the road. There are two ways we can look at this information. There's the more literal approach where the reason these two characters feel so similar is because they are the same character. M2 takes on the role of David and Afton adopts it as his child. Or there's the less literal approach.

The idea that these similarities are actually parallels designed to point us in the direction of a different kind of Fazbear theft. That they took more than Edwin's creations. They claimed his entire story. And because this is the big finale, I wanted to do something special here. Secret of the Mimic has been all about getting us to re-evaluate our past theories.

Our past ways of thinking. It showed us that we can't hold onto theories too tightly, that we need to be open-handed and explore all the possible options to us. And so, rather than stand here and try to convince you that one interpretation is right over the other, I wanted to present you with both options, explore the repercussions and flaws of each of them so that you can come to your own conclusions. So, on the left is the ending where David Afton is M2, and on the right is

the ending where Fazbear is trying to rewrite history. So go ahead, make your choice theorists, the ending where Fazbear is trying to rewrite history. So go ahead, make your choice theorists, I'll see you on the other side.