FNAF Timeline

Five Nights at Freddy’s Timeline

1970-1980
In the late 1970’s, a restaurant called Fredbear’s Family Diner opened for business. This restaurant was extremely popular as it had an animatronic mascot to entertain children. The robot was an animatronic bear named Fred Bear, after the name of the diner.
One day, during a birthday party, a child was murdered just outside the diner while Fred Bear served cake to the party guests. The murderer could only be recognized as adult dressed in a purple shirt and was never caught. News of the murder did not sit well with customers and the restaurant suffered a severe decline in popularity following the incident. Desperate, the owners sold the diner to Fazbear Entertainment and the diner closed. While this was happening, the spirit of the murdered child found its way into a large marionette used in the diner, bent on revenge for its murder.
1982
In the following years between 1982 and 1987, a new restaurant opened using parts from the older location. Fred Bear was redesigned and renamed Freddy Fazbear, after the company that now owned it. To add more interest to the new location and separate it from the original location, Fazbear Entertainment built three new robots to accompany Freddy. Bonnie the bunny, Chica the chicken, and Foxy the pirate fox were added with Bonnie and Chica being a part of Freddy’s band, and Foxy being a stand-alone side show. One man from Fazbear Entertainment was transferred to the restaurant to train the staff for tending to the animatronic band. This man would always leave messages behind for employees to refer to on tapes when his training the current staff was done. Because it was always over the phone, staff simply called him Phone Guy.
After a successful couple years, new robots were added to entertain during birthday parties. They were designed after Freddy and Bonnie, but with golden yellow fur and a hidden function. These two were designed to function as both robots and suits worn by human staff members. By use of a specialized crank, the robotic endoskeleton would move apart, allowing a human to fit inside. However, these robotic suits had a tragic flaw. The springs necessary to hold the skeleton together when the suit was functioning as a robot were very strong. Strong enough to the point that any human inside would be killed quickly. As Spring Bonnie’s spring mechanism would release suddenly and quickly, the suit was quickly nick-named, Springtrap by the staff. Soon it became apparent that the suits were too dangerous to be worn so Golden Freddy and Spring Bonnie were taken back for repairs to function solely as robots. But this change would never happen.
The spring suits were damaged so the robot remained as a suit and couldn’t be turned into robot mode. Golden Freddy’s endoskeleton had been removed for extensive repairs and Spring Bonnie’s lock was jammed open. This is where the purple killer made his move. For a while, he experimented with the robot suit to figure out how to get in and get out quickly. It was during this time, Phone Guy made mentions about the suit being moved around during the day. After rendering an employee in the parts and service area unconscious, he was able to use one of the suits for his crime. Using Spring Bonnie, the killer lured five children to the backroom where he proceeded to murder them. The killer escaped, leaving the employee to take the fall. The Puppet, still hanging around from Fredbears took pity on the five souls, and stuffed the bodies into the animatronic band. The soul that took Golden Freddy’s body couldn’t make the suit move on his own as it was an empty shell. The other robots that had a program to prevent their servos from locking up were easy to manipulate, using their free roaming mode to walk around. The children, knowing the killer was a security guard immediately began making their way toward the security office when they could manipulate the suits during the night. Fazbear Entertainment, desperate to ensure a staff member wouldn’t commit a crime like this again, moved Phone Guy to head of security during the day as he could be trusted the most.
In the meantime, parents were concerned about the state of the animatronic characters. Saying they looked like “reanimated corpses”, and that they could see “blood and mucus around the eyes and mouths.” The bodies were removed and quietly disposed of by management. But the spirits remained tied to the robots. And the night guard reported that the animatronic band would try to take him to the backstage area and stuff him inside a spare costume. This would have proved fatal as the suits were full of sharp metal parts that would kill someone if they were stuffed inside one. Management labeled this as a glitch in the system and tried to fix it by implementing use of an empty Freddy Fazbear head piece but they never got around to it. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was soon closed down for health violations with the robotic band and the place remained closed for around two or four years, left to rot.
1987
Then in 1987, the second Freddy Fazbear’s location was opened. The Phone Guy was taken off the staff and given his old position back, providing instructions for animatronic mascots. When the new location opened, rather than provide entirely new instructions, Phone Guy mixed old instructions with new current material. The original robots from the first location were brought over and for a while, staff tried to update the old robots with new technology that had only been recently invented to prevent what occurred at the first place. Advanced mobility, and facial recognition were a few of the updates. But due to the ugly design of the old bots, Fazbear Entertainment built four entirely new robots with a much cuter, kid-friendly design. Because of the cute look and the new use of an all plastic body (the original robots had a cloth body on a wire frame); these new robots were called the Toys. The new Foxy was designed to be not a pirate, but possibly a clown to entertain toddlers while the other robots retained similar roles from their older counterparts. During the first week of operation, Toy Foxy was torn apart by the kids who played too rough. The robot was repaired every day until it was decided to make it a take-apart-put-back-together attraction instead. Because of the state Toy Foxy was left in, the staff started calling it Mangle. Another addition to the cast was a small robot named Balloon Boy, a humanoid robot that would hand out balloons to children.
For the first week the toy robots would wander around and when encountering the night guard, they would see him as a skeleton without a suit. Fazbear Entertainment labeled this glitch as the toys not being given a proper ‘Night Mode’. Rather than fix this, management gave the guard a hollowed out spare Freddy Fazbear head to wear like at the first location. This would fool the robots into thinking the guard was just another robot and leave him alone. Also during the week, the older robots would activate and try to get in at the security guard, still under the guidance of the children’s angry spirits. This was also written off as a glitch in the system. It was found that flashing a light at the robots would cause a system restart from records existing from the first location, so this was also implemented as a cheap solution to protect the night guard. The Puppet, placed in the prize corner to hand out gifts to children who played the arcade games was also found to have some kind of rogue sentience that threatened the guard. To fix this, management tied a music box to the camera that would face the prize corner to keep the robot docile at night. This could be wound remotely from the security office.
After the first two weeks, the night guard was transferred to the day shift, and a man named Jeremy Fitzgerald was hired for the night shift. For six nights Jeremy worked the night shift. During this time the purple man returned again. Management had the spring suits in the back to be repaired fully and hopefully reintroduced if the new location proved successful for a long period of time. The killer used the suit again to lure children away from the party. Five more victims were taken, but their remains were not stuffed into the toy robot suits as the puppet tried to have Freddy finish the killer off once and for all. But this didn’t work as Purple Guy managed to slip away again.
This got the Toy Robots agitated by the time Jeremy began his sixth night, agitated from failing in their programming to protect the children they entertain. The following day, a birthday party was scheduled so management needed to move Jeremy to the day shift to keep an eye on the robots, who had become hostile around all adults. This was made worse by the recent events. The following day, Mangle attacked one of the customers. The robot fox bit a customer’s frontal lobe completely off. Who the victim was has never been determined. Theories about why this had happened abounded (false positives developed in the facial recognition software, tampering with the software, or Mangle’s patience whittled down by countless destruction) but none were ever proven or disproven. This event became known as the Bite of 87. Following the Bite, the toy robots were condemned to be scrapped, and the second location closed. A new temporary night guard was hired, a Mr. Fritz Smith. He was fired shortly after that for tampering with the robots. Management debated if he had tampered with the robots before the Bite, but no evidence was found supporting this.
1989
Another year or two passed before a smaller location was opened. The older robots from the first location where repaired and given an updated look since their old look was so ugly. The puppet was gutted for parts and the remains hidden under the show stage. The Golden Freddy and Spring Bonnie suit were thrown into a safe room near the entrance that was not on the robot’s AI map or the floor plan of the restaurant to hide them away from the staff. The band continued its killing spree even after the new location opened, killing the night guard whenever they could get at him. To fix this once and for all, management invested in new security doors that the guard could close and remain safe, turning the security office into its own safe room. But the new security measures were very costly, and so the restaurant had to cut back on power they could spare to use at night. The reason why this room was not made invisible to the robots was to show the public they had nothing to hide. Management also hired a private cleaning company to make any evidence of an incident of a dead night guard disappear, which further drained the funding for the power supply at night.
From 1989 to 1993 this continued as always. During this time, Pirates Cove closed down for repairs which could not be funded with struggling business. It was also during this time, the head security guard, Phone Guy, decided that he would much rather live than die working there. But just before his last week, he met his end at the hands of Freddy. But not before leaving a final set of training tapes for new employees.
1993
This is around the time a new security guard, Mike Schmidt was hired and worked for the next week before being fired for allegedly tampering with the animatronic suits. This third location struggled on for another few years before being closed for the final time. Fazbear Entertainment went bankrupt and dis incorporated Freddy Fazbears entirely. Drained from the security features they couldn’t afford and the cleaning company they’d paid to bury the evidence of the deaths. For the next few years, the location remained undisturbed. Until the early 2000s.
1999-2001
The purple guy, the real Killer returned to put an end to the robots he knew contained the angry spirits of the children he had killed. Hiding in the safe room, which was now very visible from years of age, he waited as the robots came close and as the robots turned to leave, he violently disassembled the band into pieces. Now the spirits could no longer attack or harm him physically. But the spirits were not to be beaten too easily. They rose from their robotic shells, and pursued the purple guy into the locked room. Once there they tormented purple guy until driven to desperation, dove into the Springtrap suit to fool the ghosts. Rain dripping in from the old roof made the jammed spring lock easier to move as moisture even from someone’s breath made the lock slip easily. Age and the massive amounts of moisture seeping in from the ceiling finally did it. The springs, still good after twenty years of age, snapped shut killing the murderer at last. The ghosts disappeared, but remained bound to their robots. But purple guy wouldn’t be defeated so easily. His soul bonded to the Springtrap suit to continue his killing spree.
2017
For the next sixteen years, the place sat abandoned. Then a theme park, looking to cash in on the mystery of Fazbear’s Pizza created the horror attraction, Fazbear’s Fright. The place slowly gained parts from the actual location to make this attraction the benchmark for possible future Fazbear Fright attractions. On the second night a week before the place was to open to the public, the Springtrap suit was found in the back room and placed in the attraction. The new security guard, a minor psychic took the job watching the place. During his time he felt the presence of other spirits around him. During moments before his job he’d help these spirits move on, all the while being assaulted by phantoms of the robots attacking him; the angry remains of the ghost children that refused to leave. Not only that, he had to survive the assault of the killer in the Springtrap suit, still looking to kill even after his death. The day before Fazbear’s Fright was to open; a fire occurred that burned the place to the ground. The security guard told of a puppet appearing on camera a few times. It looked real as he could see a faint reflection on the puddle of water on the floor. Management refused to believe it as they said the only part of a puppet was just a mask, not a whole suit. The ghost in the puppet, the first victim, finally destroyed the killer by destroying the suit. Leaving the killer nothing to inhabit, he was likely sent to where he belongs, and the first victim was also freed, to join the other children somewhere.