Five Nights' Timeline

I'm going to start with a blatant exclamation.
I HAVE NO CLUE! Feel free to quote me if you want, or better yet, prove me wrong, but unless I say it is true, do not take what I say as fact. It is merely me theorizing.

This is the timeline progression of the games, in other words this is the games in order of when they happened. And this is a fact. Five Nights 2 happened first, being set in 1987 which you can clearly see on the check you get at the end of night five.

Now we get into the parts that are possibly, or probably true, but might not be. 

Next in the timeline is the first Five Nights. The year is unclear at first glance, but doing a little digging can clear things up rather easily. 

First off, you can see that you get paid on November Twelfth, but the year is X’ed out. But the second thing you should notice is the amount you’re paid for five days of work. $120, it doesn't seem like much, but with this number we can determine the hourly wage and then figure out a general time that it could take place.

So $120 divided by five days is $24 which then divided by the six hours a day you work is $4. So you’re trying to not get murdered for $4/hr! Seems like pretty good pay huh? Where do I sign up?

..Back on track now, assuming you were being paid at minimum wage, or maybe a little above, we can find the time area in which this likely took place.

Looking at this graph of minimum wage in the US we can see that the minimum wage is $4 roughly between 1990 and 1996.

Now for the second part of the check, the date. We see that the date on the check is November Twelfth and most establishments give paychecks on a Friday so assuming we were paid on a Friday we can figure out the exact year. We know that this happened between 1990 and 1996 so searching through each year we can look for what year(s) November twelfth landed on a Friday. 1993 is the only year that matches that criteria so we can safely assume that the first Five Nights takes place in November of 1993.

However this is not the case. Taking a second look at the second installment, you're paid again on November twelfth. Looking back to November 1987, we see that November Twelve 1987 was actually a Thursday. This makes sense for the game because then the extra sixth night would be taking place on Friday the thirteenth. SpooOOookyYYyyy!

This also tells us that The Fazbear company hands out paychecks on Thursdays rather than Fridays and if they continued that trend all the way until the time that the first installment is happening then that changes our date. Instead of looking for when November twelfth is a Friday, we're looking for when November twelfth is a Thursday and re-checking the calendar we find that 1992 is when November twelfth was a Thursday and is the only year in our window that this happened. Therefore it is more likely that the first installment happened in 1992.

Now to figure out when the third installment takes place. Just a warning, at the moment I don't have a lot of solid info so there will be a lot of assuming and I might be completely wrong.

On December sixth of 2014, Scott the creator of the games, released this picture. There is absolutely nothing visible in the picture that gives us any clue about when Five Nights 3 takes place but in the base code of the picture, the phrase "30 Years Later" appears, which seemingly implies that the third installment takes place after either the first or second installments. This means that Five Nights 3 takes place in either 2017, or 2022. But can we possibly tell which one?

I say yes we can! ...maybe..if you don't mind some more assuming and speculations. Looking at the newspaper that appears when you start the game, we're shown that an amusement park is opening a horror attraction based on Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. Since both Five Nights 1 and 2 took place in a Pizzeria this statement doesn't help us. But what does is the last sentence. "...this attraction is guaranteed to bring back your childhood in the worst way possible." The keyword being "childhood." This attraction is being aimed towards people who went to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza as a child. We'll assume the age group of kids going to Freddy's is 2-9 years old, which is the age group for kids going to Chuck E. Cheese as well.

Based on this idea, it seems more logical that Five Nights 3 takes place in 2017. Here's why:

Horror attractions are aimed towards adrenaline junkies, normally younger people. Young adults and teenagers mostly. Now, if Five Nights 3 takes place in 2017 then the kids who went to Freddy's during 1987 (Five Nights 2) would be between 32 and 39 years old now. That seems a bit old to be an adrenaline junkie and horror fanatic. You never know, but it seems unlikely.

However kids who went to Freddy's in 1992 (The original Five Nights) would be between 27 and 34. While this age group does overlap with the other age group, notice that the second group, at its youngest is in it's mid 20's. It seems a lot more likely to me that a 27 year old would visit a horror attraction than a 36 year old. Unfortunately that's all the proof I have at the moment but I think I made a pretty logical argument.

So to recap, the Five Nights timeline is:

Five Nights 2 (November 1987) then Five Nights 1 (November 1992) and finally Five Nights 3 (2017)

If you have any proof to back me up further, or any proof against anything I've said, feel free to comment on this post! I'd love to hear about it!

Also I'm thinking of doing more posts like this in the future, let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time!