Introduction

(This majority of this Midnight Motorist article was written before Five Laps at Freddy’s basically confirmed my suspicions, it’s a conversion of the below video to text :) If there’s anything outdated with current information this is why. I still think there’s more to the box though than Scott was willing to entertain.)

FNAF’s Midnight Motorist: Fallfest, Fear and Feet!

This LONG article is the work of many hours of effort combing over every detail of one of the more elusive FNAF Minigames. It is technically the final part in my extensive work regarding FNAF 4. The previous parts are below.

Part 1 – Timeline, House, Toys, I Will Put You Back Together, Fredbear https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/10/09/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-1/

Part 2 – Foxy Kid, The Bite, The Box, Lally’s Game, Balloon Boy, The Immortal and the Restless https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/10/13/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-2/

Part 3 – The Real Jake, The Doll, The Magician https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/10/22/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-3/

Part 4 – Dittophobia, Cake, Happiest Day, Caught in a Loop, Desk Man, Afton Family, Fear Research https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/10/23/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-4/

Part 5 – Security Logbook, Balloon Boy, Log Book Conversations. https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/10/26/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-5/

Part 6 – Step Closer, Mike’s Habits, Fishing, Bad Luck, An Eye and An Arm https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/11/17/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-6/

Part 7 – Lonely Freddy, The Headless Foxy Plushie, Michael’s Personality https://www.fnaf.co.uk/2023/11/17/the-ultimate-fnaf4-guide-part-7/

Midnight Motorist is a playable minigame from Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator – the sixth game in the FNAF series.

Though this minigame is not directly found in Five Nights At Freddys 4, it concerns the events and characters that we learn about there.

Midnight Motorist itself helps to pull together everything we have learned from FNAF4

Conversely, identifying the characters in the minigame relies on understanding the relationship between the two brothers that we could only ascertain from a close inspection of FNAF 4. One holds the key to the other.

Scott himself mentioned his dissatisfaction with how the fandom felt about the storyline in FNAF4 in his highly informative interview with Dawko –

“The reaction to Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 – and the box is tied into this, you know, very closely – I don’t think that uh – people weren’t really happy from a lore standpoint, you know, even though I got the jumpscares kinda right. [..] 4 ended just too mysterious to the point where you really couldn’t – there was no real way to figure out what was going on [..]I knew that I had to go in and straighten that out. [..] I need to kind of ground this again.”

I feel this intention to tighten up the storyline was at the forefront of Scott’s mind when he made FNAF Sister Location and Pizza Simulator. Much of the information we received in FNAF6 helped to highlight areas of weak fan comprehension that Scott wanted to address.

Over the years, I have seen numerous interpretations of Midnight Motorist and of course considered the points these theories presented when deciding my eventual conclusions. Many of these theories sought to identify the orange man we play in the cutscene as the parent of some unseen murdered child or—even more strangely to me—one of the side character bullies from the FNAF 4 bite.

I feel like this interpretation neglects the fact that FNAF as we know it is a narrative concerning two central families, perhaps even focused around one main character (as evidenced in the “Four games One story” FNAF world teaser) and the concept that Scott would have dedicated such substantial screen time, development effort and cryptic meaning to a character never really named at any point in the multi-game narrative or directly relevant to the story seems quite unlikely to me.

As stated, FNAF6 is a game meant to tie up loose narrative threads. At its release, it was meant to be a closing chapter in the series, not a place where players would be presented with new characters and mysteries. Therefore, on this basis, I will address Midnight Motorist as directly applicable to the information we already possess as theorists rather than as relevant to a new or trivial side character and their familial relationships.

This won’t be short, but I want to connect every thread of meaning in this lore-dense minigame, so please stick with me until the end.

Minigame Motorist

As part of the gameplay in Pizzeria Simulator, the player unlocks new decorations and activities that they can use within their Freddy’s franchise location.

Some of these are critical plot conveyances with attached minigames.

Many of these minigames feature the game’s mascot, Helpy, in various hilarious and sometimes unfortunate situations.

However, three central 8-bit style minigames sit apart from the others as they do not feature Helpy at all and contain significant lore implications.

The first of these item tied minigames is the security puppet one, which gives us insight into the night that Henry’s daughter Charlotte was murdered; the second item is an arcade machine named Fruity Maze and provides us with a look at how one of the murdered children – who we assume to be called Susie – was lured away by William Afton.

The last of these decorations is a game cabinet known as “Midnight Motorist Arcade”, which can be purchased from the Stan’s Budget Tech section of the catalogue and is priced at $170. As a somewhat interesting aside, it seems it was called “Midnight Driver Arcade” at some point during development, as the file folder in clickteam is still named this.

This style of horizontal “coffee table” arcade cabinet is one of the oldest forms of arcade, most often seen in Japan initially but known iconically from the early arcade era. One of the most common examples is that of early Space Invaders table cabinets.

Who Made it?

So, who Created the Arcade?

It is crucial to establish who created the Midnight Motorist arcade cabinet. This is part of answering what it is trying to tell us as players, and the message changes depending on who is trying to inform us.

I think that much of what we encounter in Pizzeria Simulator is created or salvaged by Henry, William Afton’s former partner and the co-creator of the entire franchise.

This is established by the cassette-recorded instructions we receive every day, which have the same voice as the Insanity ending’s recorded message, which was labelled HRY223.

These initials are clearly reminiscent of Henry’s name, linking this moment with the character from the Silver Eyes Trilogy, where we were first introduced to him formally.

This identity is re-iterated in the fact that in his final speech Henry specifically refers to his daughter (with an image of her minigame and the security puppet on screen) and his “old friend” (with William Afton in his Scraptrap appearance being shown on screen). Therefore, I think it is a fair assumption that the Midnight Motorist arcade cabinet is indeed his creation.

I could go into the intimate importance of the history of arcade gaming as a whole to FNAF and the links it has with the history of gaming in general, but this would occupy too much space and is the work of a different article. So, for the moment, I will simplify this and only point out that arcade games are critical to understanding this franchise and try to keep it to arcade machines.

We see a vast number of arcades in Security Breach (which was codenamed Quarters in production, as quarters were the currency most often spent in arcades).

Arcades are also clearly visible and mentioned in the introduction to Freddy’s as a company in the movie.

In Pizzeria Simulator, the fruity maze arcade shows us the story of a kidnapping by William Afton, through the security puppet item. Henry also provides the player with the story of his own daughter’s murder and gives insight into how the security puppet and marionette became linked to her and her death. Henry uses the items in the pizzeria to inform the player (who we presume is Michael due to Henry’s final speech) of events around the murders.

It’s therefore straightforward to determine that Midnight Motorist was created by Henry. By linking it to the other mingames we can understand that it shows us information closely related to William Afton and his murders.

Further evidence for its importance is found in the fact that we unlock the lorekeeper ending certificate by obtaining the secrets of these three minigames and then completing the true ending of the game.

There aren’t a lot of characters in the series who would know as much as Henry.

The Arcade Machine

One of Pizzeria Simulators functionalities is that the player can engage with and play the arcades and games in and around the Pizzeria. Therefore, players get to see what the Midnight Motorist game looks like one-on-one.

The arcade’s gameplay involves steering a simplistic pixel car around traffic at high speed, going from left to right in several laps while upbeat music plays. Crashing into other cars will spin the player’s car off course and halt its momentum.

The maximum speed the car can reach in this minigame is 200mph.

Though this gameplay is only a tiny element of Midnight Motorist, I wanted to go further into the importance of this section of the game before we move on.

As stated earlier, game history is very important to FNAF in general. Scott has made numerous nods to elements of it in the games’ dates, settings, and surroundings. The video game crash even coincides precisely with the year that the crying child was killed in 1983.

William Afton’s history has plenty of similarities to the life of Nolan Bushnell, the enigmatic businessman and founder of Atari. When Bushnell founded Atari, one of the first games that he wanted to create was a driving game but he couldn’t get uptake on the concept. He instead created Pong in 1972.

However, Atari did create a driving game in 1974, one of the earliest of its kind. It wasn’t a projection-based game but electro-mechanical instead, and it looks more than a little bit familiar.

It is called “Speed Race”

This game plays almost exactly like a vertical version of Midnight Motorist with fewer lanes. I think that fundamentally both men worked on many of their arcades, so it makes sense that in processing his betrayal at the hands of his old partner, Henry would use the old medium of their collaborations.

While we are on the topic of arcades, it was worth bringing up a little aside that I found of interest. One of the first (second only by a couple of months) coin-operated arcade machines was Atari’s “Computer Space”. The cabinet for this game always looked ahead of its time to me and feels oddly familiar to William’s tastes; I think can see this kind of aesthetic present in Hand Unit and some of the other Fazbear-themed tools like the Fazwatch and Fazwrench.

In the movie, William implies that he is the sole owner of Freddy Fazbear’s, but he also gives Mike an instructional video that stresses that arcades are very dear to the owner’s heart without editing this at all.

I think both founders seem to have been invested in the arcade machines.

It is also worth mentioning here that the “hidden” section of Midnight Motorist – I say hidden (as it is accessible only by taking a right turn on lap 4 to a hidden wall) is named “Later that Night” in the Clickteam files.

The fact that there are two connected minigames in FFPS would imply that this statement somehow correlates to them. On this basis, we can safely assume that this was either the night Charlotte was killed or the night another child – potentially Susie – was killed.

Rainy Day

One of the first things we notice as we enter the secret part of the minigame is that it is raining. This rain only becomes more noticeable as the music fades out, and we are left with only the persistent hiss of the weather.

This rain is notable as it provides us with a solid linking thread to the security puppet minigame, where we saw that it was raining when Charlotte was first locked outside and that it continued to rain even some time after her murder. It was the rain that shorted out the security puppet when it managed to leave the restaurant and find her in the alleyway.

If we assume that Scott was giving hints as to which night we were looking at in Midnight Motorist, on this connecting basis, it would be safe to say we are seeing a continuation of this scene. Thanks to this rain, I think we are seeing the night of Charlotte’s murder in Midnight Motorist and can eliminate the Fruity Maze minigame from our considerations.

Before we move on, though, I want to focus more broadly on the importance of rain across the series. The weather is never used flippantly in FNAF, and we find this same rain and heavy storms at some of the most pivotal game moments.

In FNAF 3, we see William return to destroy and dismantle the animatronics, and the minigame map is full of puddles and dripping roof leaks to a soundtrack of rolling thunder. The movie also has prominent scenes of stormy weather at some of the most ominous points in the narrative, carried through in its novelisation. This is also the case in the novels and both short story series. Rainy days are important, and this isn’t even going into the amount of rainbow imagery the games are steeped in, given that rainbows are also related to rainy days or their immediate aftermath.

Rainy Day is an ability used in FNAF world, where many of the movesets offer a little insight into the characters who utilise them, particularly if these are to a restricted group of animatronics. The move itself reduces defence and deals a low amount of damage.

The most interesting version of this ability is Rainy Day 2, the improved version and one allocated to a smaller pool of characters—three of them, in fact: Golden Freddy, Nightmare Bonnie, and Nightmare. It is a purple attack by category and is the only one in this colour category that can damage enemies other than “4th Wall,” which is only used by a limited number of characters from the FNAF World Update 2.

Nightmare is a fascinating character to be able to wield this ability, as Nightmare is perhaps the closest insight that we have into what sort of creatures Agony can create. Linking Golden Freddy to the same concept of Agony retribution could also have fascinating implications. There is a clear pre-existing link between these characters when we consider that Golden Freddy appears to be the original Fredbear suit and that we see Nightmare take on a nightmarish shape almost identical to a nightmarish version of Fredbear.

Nightmare Bonnie is present in this character pool, which is incredibly interesting to me. He is the only Nightmare animatronic we see in this category – I don’t consider Nightmare an animatronic exactly – and the omission of the others makes me suspect we are meant to take note of this character choice. I will discuss Bonnie in more detail later.

The Music of Midnight Motorist

As of Sister Location, the FNAF games used custom-composed music rather than royalty-free music in their design, and the names of these music tracks have been crucial since then. Most of the music from FNAF5 to FFPS was composed by Leon Riskin, and even a few of his tracks were used in the security breach era of games. These early track names have plenty of lore relevance, and even for the ones that do not, there are often amusing puns, double meanings, or nods to music terminology.

In the Midnight Motorist segment, we encounter two separate music tracks. The first of these plays when we load into the racing minigame. This is called “240 beats per mile” and plays during the initial racing minigame. I assume this title is a combined play on a metronome pace of 240 beats per minute, combined with “miles per hour” as a measure of speed. It is worth mentioning this does appear to be a pun on the music itself, as the top speed in the minigame is 200 mph.

An additional observation here is that a heart beating 240 beats per minute would be in a dangerous situation. This is incredibly high, even during moments of intense stress or exercise, but the connotation of both is still present.

The second song in Midnight Motorist was the closest thing we had to a theme tune for William Afton for a long time. This song plays as we turn off into the secret segment of the minigame and progressively fades out to silence as the player’s character drives back to their home.

The song is upbeat and almost triumphant, giving us insight into the driver’s mindset as they drive along the winding roads. Its tone is in direct contrast to the rainy silence we find ourselves in later, which implies a shift in their state of mind even as they go along.

This song is titled Smashing Windshields, and to me, a potent mental image is associated with this title. Windshields don’t break easily as they are made of laminated glass. To me, there’s an implication of a driving impact in this track title, and a head-on collision would generally do more damage than break a windshield. However, striking an object or person which rolled up onto your windshield, on the other hand, would smash or crack it. I think William hit someone or something with his car in the continuity. My evidence for this is twofold. The first is that in UCN Toy Chica explicitly mentions running over a dog in the second episode of Toy Chica: The High School Years,

“I just know it. I told him that someone ran over his dog in front of my house.”

And mentions owning a car in the sixth.

“I’ll just wait for him after school, throw a bag over his head, hit him with a shovel, and drag him into the back of my car!”

The second is that in the other arcade, Fruity Maze, William speaks to Susie about knowing where her dog is, but we also see the same dog in a pool of blood as the game progresses. This dog, combined with the frantically smiling face of the yellow rabbit that appears in the game, leads most players to assume that William might well have been the one to hit the girl’s dog in the first place.

I also think there’s a poetic edge to this title. It’s not just a smashed windshield; it’s smashing windshields. William’s life is a commitment to a series of collisions, yet he keeps walking away from them repeatedly.

The Purple Car

William Afton’s car is almost as much of a character in FNAF as he is. In scenes where no other physical objects appear due to the pixelation of the gameplay, his car is still present, and it is uniformly purple.

We first see his car in the between-night cutscenes from FNAF2, where he drives up to kill Henry’s daughter, Charlotte.

We see it in the toll game “Fury’s Rage” as a cameo in the background.

And I believe we see it again here.

Again, I want to state that I believe we see the same purple car between FNAF2 and FNAF6 because there is no reason to think that it would be different. FNAF6 was never intended to lead fans astray or throw in narrative red herrings; we saw that from Scott’s own comments. Arguing it is different is counterproductive to the hints and repeating symbols we are given.

William is driving the car here; he is reckless in traffic as he is reckless in life. William is the player character in Midnight Motorist.

The Yellow Man and the Yellow Rabbit

When we disembark from our car, the player is represented by a slightly hunched-over yellow-coloured figure. This figure is named “person in the game files. However, in their close-up and enlarged sprite, they are called “big man.”

Many people ask why William is represented by a yellow figure when purple is so commonly associated with him.

To address this, we must first ask what purple as a colour (when used in FNAF characters) represents. We see William depicted in purple in a few places in the games, but we also see Michael degenerate into a literal purple husk after being infested by Ennard. In my opinion, purple is predominantly used to represent “dark remnant,” also known as “Agony,” the negative emotional energy that William has harvested, assuming it to be the same as true remnant “light remnant.”

We were introduced to this concept most formally in Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Delivery where the game’s goal is to collect light remnant while avoiding the dark. Collecting light fills our player meter, and dark infests the screen with a strange mist. When the player collects too many motes of dark remnant in a period, they spawn RQWQFSFASXC, Shadow Bonnie who ejects them from their efforts to collect remnant at all.

Therefore, purple represents the type of Agony that either influences or infests William at different times. It might well be that Midnight Motorist represents some new type of remnant William found from killing Charlotte. Alternatively, it could simply be that the remnant type isn’t relevant to Henry’s perception of William or that the minigame is simply a more literal representation of William than we see elsewhere.

Yellow is also very closely tied to William Afton. He is undoubtedly depicted as purple in some minigames. Still, Spring Bonnie, the springlock suit he favours the most, is golden yellow, and though it decays to a greenish mould, this underlying colour is undeniable.

When William speaks in text in the game, we see him use two distinct text colours: a deep azure blue and – more commonly – a bright yellow colour. The Fredbear plushie in FNAF world also uses this yellow colour, linking William to this interaction. As discussed in other parts of the FNAF4 guide, William is also strongly linked to the Fredbear plushie via the Private Room in Security Breach. This link is only reinforced by the reappearance of an incredibly similar observation station and presumably a recording of William’s voice in the short story “Dittophobia”.

William interchangeably uses the colours yellow and purple in the canon. It is also no coincidence that when he is depicted as Steve Raglan in the FNAF movie, he is shown wearing an off-white shirt lit in a distinctly yellow tonal hue. His tie is subtly purple, but the dominant colour impression we receive is yellow, and this is also relevant to the colour impression Scott wants him to give us.

The Ultimate Guide reiterates this theory and some exciting details, mentioning a singular animatronic and the two sets of footprints we will address later.

“Some have theorised that the yellow guy is still William Afton (Springtrap is yellow, after all) and that the grey person watching TV in the house is his son Michael. The runaway son is believed to be the bite victim, who was stolen by the animatronic, as there were two sets of footprints—one human and one animatronic—leading away from the broken window.” Pg 93

I personally like to think that the yellow man is yellow in Midnight Motorist due to a raincoat or a change of clothes.

The Grave Mound

Much as the player had to encounter a secret passable wall to reach this hidden section of the arcade minigame, there are more profound mysteries within the “Later that night” segment. If the player chooses to drive against the trees to the west of a bend in the road in just the right spot, they can disembark and wander around a clearing with what appears to be a pile of earth in it.

When it comes to a pile of earth like this, there are three main things a theorist might think of. The first is the first thing any human being might think of—a grave.

The location certainly lends itself to this interpretation. The setting is remote, and due to the gameplay component of this being a secret Easter egg rather than signposted to the player, we can assume it isn’t easy to find to a casual driver. This individual knows where this mound is and comes to visit it. They say nothing about it, and the object is not interactable. The player can only wander and wonder before returning to their car and pushing onwards.

Knowing William is a serial killer, this is entirely congruous with serial killer behavior, where they will often keep trophies (as he seems to do in the first movie with the toy plane from Garret) or will return to visit the bodies of their victims or other fixations. There is an element of serial killer psychology that cannot tolerate relinquishing any hint of control.

We see grave symbolism over and over throughout the series. There are the graves of the missing children, Charlotte’s grave in the Silver Eyes, the graves in Help Wanted’s Curse of Dreadbear hub, Help Wanted 2’s graveyard, and Princess Quest’s graveyard. We see opened graves in Security Breach, the glitched areas of the Foxy log ride, and numerous other places. We even see a cute ghost Helpy rise from a grave in one of the level select screens in Help Wanted.

The second possible interpretation of this disturbed dirt is that the twisted animatronics bury themselves in the novel trilogy during the day.

This is a possibility but a far less significant one. The novel carefully sets the twisted animatronics apart from any other canon set we have encountered, describing them as an unusual and simplistic plastic material that projects illusion disc imagery onto them. Indeed, when Charlie and the others witness them, they appear monstrous. Still, the novel intricately describes them as organic with their discs in effect, with biological features and convincing fur. This does not line them up with the Nightmare animatronics from FNAF 3 exactly, who are monstrous but in their specific way, deviating in many ways from the twisted animatronics in the novel.

The twisted ones primarily instruct us that even the most plastic animatronics can appear monstrous if they are projected onto by illusion technology. I think, if anything, this connects them to the toy animatronics. The quote is quite long, but I feel like all of it is pertinent, from the Freddy Fazbear with “rosy cheeks” as Toy Freddy has and the description of Bonnie, which feels just like Toy Bonnie.

We could connect the Freddy to Funtime Freddy with his rosy cheejs, but that animatronic set specifically lacks a standalone Bonnie, and his hand puppets are never mentioned.

“It’s—it’s some kind of transmitter embedded in a disc,” Charlie said. “It scrambles your brain, cluttering it with nonsense so that you see what you expect to see.” “Then why don’t they look like that?” Clay pointed to wall posters depicting a very cheerful Freddy Fazbear with rosy cheeks and a warm smile. “Or that.” John had found another, depicting Bonnie jovially strumming a bright red guitar so shiny it looked like it was made from candy. Charlie looked thoughtful for a moment. “Because we didn’t come here first.” She walked toward the posters. “If you were a little kid and you saw the cute commercials, then saw these posters and toys and all that stuff, then I think that’s exactly what they would have looked like.” “Because you already have those images in your head,” John said. He tore the Freddy poster off the wall and stared at it momentarily before letting it fall to the ground. “But we know better. We know they’re monsters.” “And we’re afraid of them,” Charlie said. “And so we’re seeing them for exactly what they are,” John concluded.

Breed-Wrisley, Kira; Scott Cawthon. The Twisted Ones: Five Nights at Freddy’s (Original Trilogy Graphic Novel 2) (Five Nights At Freddy’s) (p. 251). Scholastic Inc.. Kindle Edition.

This moment establishes that Toy Animatronics, as we see them in the game continuity, could absolutely appear similar to the nightmares without any requirement other than some illusion medium.

We can also examine the known behaviour of the animatronics for further information on the possibility they are involved in this scene. In the twisted ones, the animatronics only appear to bury themselves when forced to be outside or on the trail of something specific. They do not bury themselves at night or far from human habitation. It is a vulnerable state for them, and they can be easily destroyed in this position; there’s no reason for them to do this in a forest at midnight.

Also, if William owned a twisted animatronic at this point in the timeline, it would only stand to reason it would be in Sister Location, where it could be safely stowed rather than buried in a forest. With the transient nature of these burrowed hiding places, it is also unlikely that William would know where they were or – if he did – care to visit them. In my opinion, there is no narrative impact to him standing by the hiding place of one of his own machines. This mound, as well-hidden as it is, has an equally well-hidden and secret meaning to what we are looking at.

In summary, I don’t think the mound we see in Midnight Motorist is one of the twisted ones; it is more likely something else that was buried “for now” back in FNAF 4.

The third possibility, and the one I believe, is that FNAF 6 brings us back to the box, and Scott takes us straight to it in the woods. The box is more than simply a box; it ultimately becomes the coffin for a secret and the reason for everything William Afton has done during the six games.

On that night, after taking the first step along the path to his ruin, William Afton visits the reason for everything: his son.

JR’s

One of the more contested parts of Midnight Motorist is the location the driver heads to. The driver turns off the main path and pulls into a parking lot. Five parked cars are in the lot: three blue, one red, and one turquoise. The player disembarks their vehicle and can wander around this area. To the left of the parking lot is a low-set building with an orange sign that reads JR’s

The pixel style does not indicate exactly what kind of location JR’s is. Some people speculate it is a bar or a place to eat. However, to guess its purpose, we must look at the existing nudges regarding its function. In the Ultimate Guide, it is referred to as a “restaurant called JR’s”. I’ve seen people disregard the Ultimate Guide because of its discrepancies with known facts. Still, I think it is telling in this instance that they don’t even show any ambiguity in this statement nor attribute it to a theory. The alternative is nothing at all but speculation.

I don’t see Scott introducing a bar into the series at this juncture, given that we see almost zero references to drinking throughout the books or games. For instance, the Fazbear’s Frights short story series comes to a total of 32768 pages, and there is mention of alcohol in about four of them, all contained within the same story. Scott is mindful of his referencing of alcohol abuse, and there isn’t much reason to assume this is where he would start. Also, I know that the USA has some really messed up drinking culture quirks, but a full parking lot at a bar seems utterly alien to me personally.

Based on the context we have, along with some other interesting elements of existing maps we have in our possession, I think that JR’s is a restaurant despite still having people in it at midnight. Some restaurants are open 24/7 in the US, especially in this era, such as Waffle House. Narratively, a restaurant makes more sense to me, and it also raises the possibility that we are seeing a repurposed Freddy’s or Fredbear’s location in this spot.

Navigation and Distance

One of the most comprehensive maps of the sprawling area William’s laboratory occupies underground is found in the breaker room in Sister Location, officially known as Circus Baby’s Entertainment and Rental. It gives us a good idea of the series’s relative distance and position between significant locations.

It is worth stressing that this map is not at all to scale, as we can see from the relative width of connecting vents to large rooms, along with the size of the FNAF 4 house relative to Fredbear’s and the hallway.

This isn’t unusual; many maps for clarity omit scale as a consideration; some of the best-designed subway maps, for instance, don’t account for the actual length of the tracks.

I do find it interesting, though, that the location of Fredbears is almost the exact distance from the FNAF 4 room as Jrs is from the house at the end of the road.

Of course, this is simply speculation. Scott makes valuable maps, but ultimately, they cannot be reliably compared to one another due to inherent issues with scale.

As far as speculation goes, I think Jrs may be a new location that opened in the closed Fredbear’s location or another restaurant that Henry opened after he and William had some falling out. This isn’t unprecedented and is something we see a few times in the short stories series. In the Frights (and their epilogues), Freddys becomes a run-down Pizza location with a ball pit. We also see a location called “Papa Bear’s Pancake House” that was also a Freddy’s.

The highly specific name of “Papa Bear’s Pancake House” first made me think that perhaps Jrs is some kind of waffle house.

The Green Man

Outside Jrs, there is a green man who can be spoken to. If we talk to him, he says

“Come on, you know you can’t be here. Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”

This statement tells us quite a bit about the green man’s relationship with the player’s character. His exasperation as he pleads for reason with “Come on” and re-iterates “, You know you can’t be here”, informs us that this is not at all the first time the yellow man has tried to enter or even hover around this location and that he has previously been explicitly reminded of the reasons why he can’t be. The player doesn’t find out the motivating incident, but they certainly can feel the shape of one in the past.

The green man goes on to ask yellow not to make things more difficult than they have to be. Again, we can examine this as a statement of reluctance; we get the impression that the green man doesn’t want to start an argument or cause a scene, and there’s a hint of weariness and concern in it. Based on how aggressively the yellow man reacts to the closed door later, we can assume he can be aggressive in any situation.

The green man may be just an employee of whatever location Jrs is, but part of me feels like it is more than that. The familiarity and exhaustion they display in the conversation make me feel like they likely have a closer relationship with the yellow man than just a stranger. They know him and reason with him, and ultimately, he turns away without a word of argument when they gently ask him not to make things difficult.

He does not tolerate loss of control in other areas but tolerates it here. This is partly why this individual might be Henry, William’s former business partner.

Another reason I associate this figure with Henry is because of his colour. Henry is often associated with the colour green.

“Charlie traced it with her index finger, her pulse fluttering in her throat like her heart was trying to get out. Daddy. She opened the box and saw it—on top was an old, green plaid flannel shirt, worn down as thin and soft as cotton.

Cawthon, Scott; Breed-Wrisley, Kira. The Fourth Closet: Five Nights at Freddy’s (Original Trilogy Book 3) (Five Nights At Freddy’s) (p. 232). Scholastic Inc.. Kindle Edition. “

His favourite plaid shirt is green. We know it is his favourite because it is worn down through frequent wear. Henry also chooses green as the armband colour for his daughter in the security puppet minigame. They security puppet itself has bright green eyes.

There are several other instances of Henry’s parallel characters in The Frights and Tales showing a proclivity for green, but these are just a few critical moments. He even makes Charlie a green frog.

Henry is the green man at Jrs, and as I have stated it is also very possible that this is a new restaurant he either opened or worked at after he and William had a conflict after the bite at Fredbears.

I have discussed Fallfest previously, but we know it was an event likely hosted by William yearly and supported by Henry. As we can see from Help Wanted, it was hosted on the farmland adjacent to William’s house.

There was a major fire at a Fallfest event, something I suspected in Help Wanted but which we explicitly see start and spread in Help Wanted 2. This might have been linked to whatever came between the two men. The security puppet is heavily involved in giving us this information.

Did Henry set the Fallfest fire? He certainly set the FNAF 6 fire.

If they both had a falling out, this would explain why William considered it extra acceptable to opportunistically target Henry’s daughter the moment she was caught outside Fredbears. Rage or a desire to teach Henry a lesson would also explain making such a patently stupid decision in the moment.

It is also worth mentioning that if you invert the colour of the green man, they turn a colour very reminiscent of William’s iconic shade of purple. Henry is ultimately William’s opposite in the canon. This might well be coincidental, but I found it entertaining nonetheless.

The yellow man gives up on Jrs and the green man (we can do nothing else as a player) and returns to his car to head south.

The Dark Forest

The road towards the house grows narrower and narrower, implying a more isolated track into the woods.

It is worth re-iterating here that the house is in an isolated forest. As we noted in the section regarding the pile of dirt in the hidden clearing, all of this minigame takes place within a thickly forested region. This is a convenient barrier when converted to 8-bit graphics, but beyond this, it is worth asking where else we see a forest this dense?

Where else do we see hidden clearings in forests? Where else are secrets concealed within thick 8-bit trees?

In FNAF world, the lower levels are 8-bit and glitchy versions of a forest we wander through, looking for a glitched tree that will permit us to go even further down.

The lowest level, which we can no longer return to once we enter, takes us to a forest clearing shaped like the one where we find the dirt pile in Midnight Motorist. Instead of the dirt pile here, we see a pool with a patient fisherman sitting beside it. The pool itself feels like it is meant to represent the grave in the forest in some ways, the parallels are hard to ignore.

Old man consequences seems to be trying to retrieve something from the pool, just as William is trying to retrieve his son from beyond the grave. The forest is a maze in many regards, a place that the spirit of the crying child can’t seem to escape from.

In the FNAF movie the children’s spirits inhabit the Nebraska forest that was the last place Michael saw his brother Garret.The forest is important in the series, and it seems like William Afton, at the time of Fredbears, lived in a fairly dense and forested area.

The House

The house in Midnight Motorist isn’t accessible by car, so the yellow man has to park some distance away and walk in the rain. The house layout isn’t clear to us as we only travel through two rooms: a TV room as you enter the door and a hallway with what is presumably a bedroom north of it. It is worth mentioning here that most maps I’ve seen put together of the house ignore the fact that in 8-bit games, the distance between screens is unknown. We are missing the screen showing the bedroom inside the house and the corresponding screen to the side of the bedroom on the outside. We don’t know if any doors lead off to the left or right of the living room or the hallway outside the bedroom, either.

According to the house’s sprite on the map, there is a second floor or a loft in the roof space. We can’t even be sure that the player enters via the property’s front door, as on the sprite, two windows flank the front door, which is a detail we only see on the left side of the property. On this basis, I don’t think the 8-bit game view we receive of the property is entirely reliable for mapping out a view of the interior. However, I believe the clumps of bushes surrounding the property are strongly reminiscent of the load screen of FNAF 4, and the red sky we see there also links Help Wanted’s DLC to this property. In HW, we rarely get a secret hub version where the sky turns red, which gives us a good view of the house on the forested hills.

There is no reason not to think that the property in Midnight Motorist is the same property we see in the Help Wanted Halloween Hub and the FNAF 4 load screen. This gives us further evidence as to exactly which kind of animatronic might have been in the bushes outside the bedroom to leave footprints and why they may have looked that way to the escapee.

The Brother

Inside the property, we see a person bathed in the flickering light of a CRT television. They appear to be seated on a recliner. The figure has a grey shirt on and seems to have a white, flesh-coloured face, either due to the light cast from the television illuminating them or to differentiate them from the chair they are sitting in.

One central character in the series is associated with television watching, and this is Mike; he almost always appears in conjunction with televisions, and it is one of the few consistent symbolic threads we have for him. In FNAF 4, he hides behind the TV to jump out and scare his brother. His entire gameplay loop in FNAF 1 is about watching cameras as part of his role as a night guard; it has been a symbol since the start.

In Sister Location, at the end of every night, we find ourselves back in Mike’s house, in front of the television, eating popcorn. It happens over and over again; no matter how bad things get at work for him during the day, he comes home and sits in front of the television to forget it. This informs us that this kind of blank television watching is a coping mechanism Michael has developed. The most traumatic event we know that happened to him was the bite, and it stands to reason that in Midnight Motorist, which takes place after the bite, he would still be traumatised, awake at Midnight and watching television.

This also interestingly links Mike to old horror movies. In this era in the US, local television (beginning in the 1950s) was very common to air low-budget movies late at night, with some kids sneaking out of bed to watch them. The projectors in Help Wanted remind us of this tradition of late-night horror movies.

In Security Breach, we see another setup exactly mimicking the setup in Sister Location, complete with spilt popcorn in a strange isolated room in the bowels of the Pizzaplex. This room has a looping instance of the Fredbear and Friends cartoon and also contains the wall poem secret and the tape player we need to hear the therapy tapes. Whoever was here is now gone and never comes back during the game, but it is obvious to link this in some fashion to Mike. The television in FNAF 4 even played a Freddy’s cartoon in 1983 when he jumpscared his brother.

We even see a television in the FNAF movie, which was considered important enough to the series to depict Mike and Abby watching cartoons and other shows on it. They own numerous VHS tapes, and many shots in the movie reiterated this.

The man in the chair is wearing a grey shirt, which matches the colour of the shirt that Mike was wearing the day of the bite. This is also the same colour as his text colour, though we will come back to this later.

When the player speaks to the man in the chair, he says. “Leave him alone tonight. He had a rough day.” What this tells us about the figure is that he, in some way, feels protective of whoever the yellow man is heading towards while also understanding that it is not uncommon for the man in yellow to go after him. This implies that he frequently bullies or takes cruel acts against the individual in the room, but also seems to hint that the person in the chair doesn’t know how to stop it beyond offering reasons why he shouldn’t.

They don’t get up or follow the yellow man; this is all they say to them.

We don’t see what kind of rough day the person in the bedroom had, but if Dittophobia and FNAF 4 are anything to go on, we can assume that the kid is tortured with horrors at night time.

In the chair, Mike doesn’t seem to agree with what is happening but is checked out of the situation. There is a certain level of symmetry to this moment where he remains in his chair, while the captive has escaped from his room. He does the same thing in Sister Location but helps a captive escape in that game. His sister escapes in Sister Location. Did he have any hand in helping his brother flee in Midnight Motorist, or is his inaction simply one of his many regrets?

Power and Control

The yellow man makes his way up to the door of what we assume to be a bedroom and thumps on it. He warns, “I told you not to close your door.”

Immediately, this is an insight into a particular kind of controlling personality. Parents who refuse to permit their children to close their bedroom doors restrict their privacy and often cross boundaries with their independence. We already know that the yellow man is an unsavoury individual, as shown by how the man in the chair tries to appease his anger. Now, we see him threatening the boy in the bedroom.

We know here that whoever lives in the room is not permitted to close their door, is not having a good time, had a “rough day”, and has, for some reason, locked his door in the face of all threats to the contrary.

Unwilling to give up, the yellow man won’t let the player move south back to the TV room but stops dead, stating, “This is my house. He can’t ignore me like that.” This statement once again asserts that we are dealing with an individual who is controlling and considers that other people should abide by their rules within their property. He is clearly annoyed by the fact that his demand was apparently ignored.

This annoyance comes through loud and clear as he walks back to the door and slams far more loudly and frantically on it, dropping all pretence of ordinary speech to yell, “OPEN THE DOOR!” This short temper gives us further insight into the character of this individual, escalating from threats to aggression almost immediately when he feels that his control has been slighted in some fashion.

Rather than give up, he states, “I’ll find a way in from outside..” To me, this escalates the situation beyond the scope of an average abusive parent into an individual who is willing to go to absurd lengths to get what they want. Heading into the yard in the rain to get into a locked room through other means escalates the situation. We find ourselves as players immediately concerned by how much further someone like this might escalate events, given the inconvenience they are willing to endure to extinguish any glimmer of rebellion in their children.

The yellow man leaves the house and walks around the property either to the left or right, coming to the back of the property, where a window is broken. A trail of muddy footprints leads away from the house. A single set of animatronic footprints wait by one of the bushes.

The yellow man looks at the footprints and states, “Ran off to that place again. He will be sorry when he gets back.”

At this point, the player certainly believes him, and we find ourselves sympathising with the escapee and wondering where “that place” might be. I think that it is possible that, in this case, “that place” is either Freddys or the JRs, which might also be a former Fredbear’s location and the place where the bite occurred. I think this because despite being willing to scale his own house in the rain, the yellow man does not follow the footprints off into the night. He theoretically could, but I think he knows he can’t go back to the scene of his murder without drawing suspicion.

This is also not the first time the boy has run off, and he fully expects him to return on his own.

So he waits, and we find ourselves hoping that his son doesn’t come back because there seems to be an implication this time that he will lock him up and control him even more intensely than before, and this is where the game ends.

The yellow man shows a huge need for control, and William Afton is obsessed with this throughout the series. He is adamant that he will obtain everything he thinks he is entitled to.

The Escapee

The boy who is being held relatively captive in his bedroom – albeit with the door open – runs away by breaking a window at the back of the house. This is interesting; if the door was open, he could walk out the same door the yellow man enters, but he does not. Is he scared of something in the house? Is the figure in the chair supposed to be watching him?

His choice of escape was motivated by wanting to remain unnoticed for as long as possible. Whatever made his day so horrible seemed to be a breaking point, and he departed into the night.

Due to the limitations of the 8-bit format, we cannot tell if the window was broken from the inside or the outside. If the animatronic out in the bushes had broken it, we would see those footprints approach the house. We don’t. In fact, we know the human footprints continue past the bushes on their own.

I’ve seen people speculate the animatronic kidnapped the boy from his bedroom, but I don’t think that the evidence we have here implies that at all. If anything, the boy leaves accompanied by some waiting animatronic, with his own footprints heading off beyond the bushes unhindered. The yellow figure seems to be fully capable of interpreting the evidence he sees and knows what it implies. This would make sense for William Afton, as he works with animatronics all the time and might even have used them out in the yard previously to attempt to keep the kid in the house.

We see some evidence for this in FNAF 4’s introduction screen, where we are shown the property in the distant background, but with a focus on dark shadowy bushes containing nightmare Foxy, Freddy, and Bonnie. Suppose we are to assume the nightmares are versions of the animatronics primarily visible to someone undergoing fear experimentation, as we see in Dittophobia. In that case, I think that it is fair to assume that this is a sight that was pretty common to the crying child as they underwent both fear experimentation and a campaign of terror from their own family.

Animatronic Footprints

While we are looking at the final screen of the minigame, it is worth considering the footprints we are given. These footprints have three toe prints and a flat baseplate.

The immediate era of animatronics this brings to mind is the Toys; they all have clear sets of flat-plated three-toed feet. As I have discussed previously, it would be entirely possible for the toys to appear as Nightmares while still only leaving the physical trail of evidence we’d expect from them.

However, we can briefly omit all of the other eras. The original animatronics and the withereds have large, all-in-one, three-toed paws that would not leave segmented footprints.

Withered foxy is the only exception with three toes but with a bare endo that doesn’t quite line up with what we see.

The rockstars specifically have four toes on each foot, the glamrocks also have all-in-one paws, and the nightmares in their Illusion appearance either have four toes or extensive damage to their feet that would impact their footprints.

Therefore, these footprints were left by a toy animatronic using an illusion disc to appear as they would have been expected to look to the boy in the house.

This is supported by the teaser image which reads “what is seen in shadows is easily misunderstood in the mind of a child”

How can the Crying Child be in two places?

I do realise that I have been referring to the crying child in this discussion as both the body in the box in the woods and the captive within the bedroom in William’s house. How is this possible?

I have discussed this extensively in my FNAF4 guide thus far, and much of my reasoning and backing can be found in the previous parts, but to sum up, here, the Crying Child died after the bite and was rebuilt as a robot.

This is what we see both in The Real Jake and in the FNAF novel trilogy with Charlie. It is not a new concept to the series and is hinted at numerous times. We even see what a child-sized robot might look like in both Lally’s game and in William’s research lab in the robotic child faces in the central navigation hub.

He states he will put him back together, and part of that process is giving his remnant a place to reside.

I think that the physical human body of William’s son is in the box at the time of Midnight Motorist because there is no way he could have an official funeral or announce that he died to the town while having a robot replacement wandering around his house.

Even the phone guy marvels that it is possible to survive the kind of injury that the crying child sustained in the phone calls we hear from him in FNAF 2

“It’s amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know? “

And the fact of the matter, as far as I’m concerned, is that he technically didn’t.

William creates an iteration of his son, who will never age without a new body to grow up into, exactly as Charlie couldn’t grow up without her other closets in the novels.

He runs away, potentially with a rogue animatronic in tow.

It sounds a little bit familiar, doesn’t it? Perhaps it makes more sense why Gregory in Security Breach is homeless now. His age is inconsistent with his physical appearance, and he appears to have a strange rapport with some animatronics he encounters.

For Midnight Motorist, this is the central explanation that ties together our other threads and various characters’ attitudes surrounding the situation. We see the ripples of this minigame out into the rest of the series, and with this explanation, the impacts and narrative interest are incredibly high.

What it’s not.

It is also important at this juncture to address who I do not think the child in Midnight Motorist is. I do not believe for a moment that the child we see in this minigame is Andrew.

To me, Andrew is a character without bulk or substance. He is intangible in the stingers he appears in, a ghost of a ghost. We don’t find out what happened to him to make him the way he is within the pages of the story, and we don’t find out why he feels so vengeful towards William in the man in room 1280.

Like Michael in the trilogy, Andrew is a placeholder for a character Scott has left for us to discover in the games. I have my own thoughts on who this vengeful spirit is, but I don’t think it is Andrew.

Even if we were to assume the captive child in this instance was Andrew in the hands of some unpleasant father figure, this does not explain why he would harbour such deep vitriol towards William nor the relevance of this step-father figure in regard to the car and other symbols of this game. The children are generally deluded about the yellow rabbit or William’s relationship towards them, seeing him as a friend to be more or less obeyed. Any exception to this rule would have occurred during exceptional circumstances, be a unique individual or have a special motivation to resent him.

Andrew cannot stand up to William. He doesn’t stand up to him in the stingers, only torments him and denies him death. In the end, during the head to head conflict it is Jake who intervenes to free the boy, and he is sucked away without a word or insight into him.

I don’t think Andrew is the child in Midnight Motorist, and I don’t think it would make sense to introduce this side book character into a game and minigame intended to help clarify the existing mysteries of FNAF 1-6

Any crossover in FNAF 6 is rooted firmly in the Silver Eyes Trilogy. William’s name being confirmed and Henry being a solid character were both from this source. Andrew isn’t even present in these books, and I certainly don’t think that the child is Michael Brooks, a uniformly sweet, sentimental and sweetened version of the Golden Freddy we see in the canon of the games.

On this exact same point, I don’t think that Dittophobia is a literal description of the events here or a character who exists within the continuity of the games. Much like Andrew and Michael, he is a flimsy shape of a character that is used to shed light onto the motivations and incidents of the game with a name that overlaps with the name I suspect to be the Crying Child’s name.

Text Colours

Before we conclude, I want to look at the use of text colour throughout FNAF world, FNAF 4 and FNAF 6 with a specific view of Midnight Motorist. Scott uses the colour of someone’s text in a game without voices to denote who is speaking. Therefore, the choice of colour is significant.

In Midnight Motorist, we see three different text colours. The green man speaks in green, the man in the chair in front of the television speaks in grey, and the yellow man speaks in bright golden-yellow text.

We see plenty of golden text in the series, almost always attributed to William or Fredbear, seeing it throughout FNAF world, in FNAF 4’s fredbear scenes and also in the Fruity Maze interaction with Susie.

The man in the grey chair with the grey text aligns neatly with Mike, who uses grey text when he speaks in the FNAF 4 bite scene and when he seems to speak to his brother at the end of the game.

The green text we see from the green man also matches the overall text colour for a child who might be Sammy in the FNAF 4 cutscene.

This would provide yet another link to Henry since they specifically mention their daddy creating them a Spring Bonnie plushie with a finger trap, not something just any random person would do.

We don’t see the missing child speak in this cutscene, but at least from the context of FNAF 4, we could guess his text colour might be white.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Midnight Motorist is a very solvable minigame with an exciting story. It gives us a brief insight into how William Afton interacted with his immediate family, the events in the wake of the murder, and his attitude towards his children.

It answers several questions and directs us towards various earlier events with more clarity than before. The music lets us see how William was feeling and the high he experienced after the murder before we are taken along with him into a place without music.

The silence seems deafening in the wake of the thrill of the kill and escape, punctuated only by the hissing rain, and perhaps he is frustrated to find himself back in the same numb emotional place he was in before. We see one of his children is so emotionally tormented that he runs away into a pitch-dark rainy night to avoid whatever William intended to do to him. We see the patient cruelty of a man who would wait to punish him.

Midnight Motorist gives us a look at the man William is, the state Michael finds himself in after the bite kills his brother and establishes just how much William loves his stupid purple car.

If Henry is indeed the green man, he was one of the few eyewitnesses who saw William later that night when he took a break outside the restaurant in town. Perhaps they were there waiting for news of what happened to his daughter. Maybe at that point, his trust in his old friend was rightly frayed too far, and he didn’t want him to join them. There are a lot of theoretical narrative reasons why things might have happened or why people were in the locations they were. It’s part of the joy of FNAF overall.

However, I think we can glean some clear vital points from this minigame, and I thank you for sticking with me this long in my assessment of it. I wanted to do it justice, as it is and has always been one of my favourites.