Prerelease:Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted
This page details pre-release information and/or media for Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted.
Contents
Base Game
Early Key Art
Version 1
On March 11th, 2019, Scott Cawthon released the first proper teaser for the game on his (now inactive) website ScottGames, which featured a closeup of the top left corner of the amalgamation of animatronics from the game's key art. The teaser was then taken down not even a full day after it went up, because people noticed that Funtime Foxy and Spring Bonnie's models were actually fan made models made by GaboCOart and ViTCH respectively, the latter of which was made for the FNaF fangame series POPGOES, which funnily enough became an official FNaF spinoff series over a year later thanks to the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative. Scott later stated in a Reddit post that Steel Wool told him that the models were just being used as placeholders since they weren't done texturing their own models of those characters, alongside the fact that the artist who added the fan models thought that they were made by Scott himself.
Version 2
Two weeks later, ScottGames was updated to feature the final version of the key art following the premiere of the game's first trailer during Sony's first-ever State of Play. Steel Wool, however, posted an alternate version on X which featured an updated version of Spring Bonnie where Nightmarionne should be, alongside Toy Bonnie facing the camera instead of looking down. The post was later silently taken down and reposted with the final version of the artwork. Additionally, while the Spring Bonnie seen in this version of the artwork does have a different face compared to the first version, his jaw and ears still match up with ViTCH's model.
Early Title
According to the game's listing on the PEGI website, the original title for the game was Five Nights at Freddy's: Virtual Nightmare.[1]
Spring Bonnie
As revealed by the early key art and some files in the final game, a Spring Bonnie animatronic was meant to appear in the game at one point. While Spring Bonnie technically appears in the game as Springtrap and Glitchtrap, the former is heavily withered and has a corpse inside him while the latter is a person(?) wearing a mascot costume instead of an animatronic; both of them are also considered separate characters. A proper Spring Bonnie animatronic only appears in the form of a shadow in Pizza Party's level select icon, and one of his leftover suit textures is used as part of the shader used by Glitchtrap and his glitchy gravestone from the Curse of Dreadbear game over area.
Over two years after the game released, we got our first proper look at Spring Bonnie's model in the book Five Nights at Freddy's: The Ultimate Guide, which contained an image of Spring Bonnie's model T-posing in a void as part of the book's Animatronic Inventory section. Another two years later, Spring Bonnie's full model was found by lbphaxmods, who found him in a prototype build of the game that had just been sitting unnoticed on the Meta servers for four whole years. Interestingly, this discovery revealed that The Ultimate Guide actually used an image of a slightly earlier version of Spring Bonnie's model, as indicated by the fact that his eyelids are yellow instead of being black like the prototype version.
Early FNaF 1 Office
In a clip shown during the first trailer, the Cupcake found in the FNaF 1 office has a different model compared to the final game, most notably with the wrapper and frosting. As it turned out, this was actually a fan made model created by Superkerbin in 2015. Obviously, this wouldn't go well with pretty much everybody, so the model was eventually replaced with an original one. The piece of paper under the fan also uses a different texture.
Brown Nightmare Fredbear
As seen in the first ever gameplay trailer for the game, Nightmare Fredbear was originally brown for some reason rather than a yellow, golden color. His hat and bowtie were also originally black, making him look more like Freddy Fazbear. In the final game, these colors were changed to yellow and purple respectively.
Character Encyclopedia Images
| Phantom Foxy (Encyclopedia) | Phantom Foxy (Final) | Blacklight Foxy (Encyclopedia) | Blacklight Foxy (Final) |
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An image of an early version of Phantom Foxy is used on page 99 of the Official Character Encyclopedia (Five Nights at Freddy's) book. This version of him has a full endoskeleton and he also uses an old version of the Mat_Master_Ghost shader that appears to be the same version Phantom Mangle used in the game's first gameplay trailer, which is simply translucent instead of a mix of opaque and transparent parts. An image of the unused Blacklight Foxy can also be found on page 108 of the book, which reveals that he actually had a unique suit texture at one point!
Curse of Dreadbear
Dreadbear in Hallway Crawl
The DLC's Steam page features a couple of screenshots of Dreadbear standing in the Hallway Crawl level, accompanied by... Unreal Engine 4 error messages. While Dreadbear was used in the level in prototypes of the DLC that were left in versions 1.09 and 1.10 of the game's PlayStation 4 port, these screenshots seem to just be the result of a developer messing around as Dreadbear isn't using his walking animation or facing forward.
Full Level Icons
Full versions of the level select icons for Build-A-Mangle, Plushkin Patch and Trick or Treat can be found on all of the DLC's store pages, minus the Meta Quest and Viveport stores in Trick or Treat's case. The full version of Corn Maze's icon can also be found on the Curse of Dreadbear section of the Projects page on Steel Wool Studios technical artist Nathan Spandorf's website.
| Build-A-Mangle | Corn Maze | Plushkin Patch | Trick or Treat | |
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Unused Steam Page Background
The DLC's page on Steel Wool's website contains a background depicting the amalgamation of animatronics from the base game's key art looming over a dark woodland that's littered with monitors on the ground. The image's filename—Steam_PageBackground_FNAFVR_DLC.png[2]—reveals that it was actually made for the the DLC's Steam page, however it ultimately ended up not being used there for reasons that are unknown.
