Five Nights at Freddy's developer Scott Cawthon loves messing with his fans. Not only is the entire Five Nights at Freddy's series based on tormenting players with unexpected (or, even worse, expected but unpredictable) jump scares, but Cawthon constantly toys with fans' emotions via the web, too. Remember when Cawthon pretended that Five Nights at Freddy's 3 was cancelled due to a malicious hack? What about when he released Five Nights at Freddy's 2 in its entirety, before the game's demo was even scheduled to come out?

Well, it looks like Cawthon's at it again. Just a few hours ago, Cawthon announced that Five Nights at Freddy's 4 - ostensibly the last game in the low-budget horror series - will come out on October 31, 2015. Understandably, fans were excited. A few of them started poking around on Cawthon's website, looking for more information, and now some players think they've uncovered what Five Nights at Freddy's 4 is about: a mysterious incident called "The Bite of '87."

For those not in the know, Five Nights at Freddy's series takes place in Chuck E. Cheese-inspired pizza parlors, in which seemingly friendly animatronics come to life at night and embark on murderous rampages. Players must protect themselves by using the restaurants' security systems, monitoring the robotic animals' movements with cameras and turning on lights and mechanical doors to stay alive.

According to Five Nights at Freddy's lore (yes, the game has a surprisingly detailed backstory), in 1987, one of the animatronics attacked a customer, severing his frontal lobe. This attack, dubbed The Bite of '87, sent the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza franchise on the road to financial ruin. The Bite is mentioned in all three Five Nights at Freddy's games, although the details have never been revealed.

It looks like that's about to change. In the HTML code on Cawthon's personal homepage, all of the meta tags have been peppered with the numbers 8 and 7: for example, "author" becomes "a8u7t8h7or," Cawthon's name is spelled "S7c8ott Ca8w78t8h7o8n," and so on. That could be a very strange bug, but it's much more likely that Cawthon's giving his biggest fans a hint; after all, this is the same guy who confirmed a Freddy's sequel through the name of an image on his website.

If the game centers on The Bite of '87. would make the game a prequel to the original title, as well as Five Nights at Freddy's 3, which takes place far in the future. According to most fan theories, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 takes place just before the Bite of '87.

That's not the only Easter egg hidden on the Five Nights at Freddy's site, either. Fans also discovered that brightening the Five Nights at Freddy's 4 teaser image reveals that the word "nightmare" platered across the bottom of the picture. That could mean that, as a popular fan theory argues, the entire series is just a bad dream; it could also mean that the game is going to be as scarier than ever. Fans will find out for sure this October.

Five Nights at Freddy's 4 supposedly comes out on October 31, 2015 for PC, although with Cawthon, one can never be too sure.

Source: Kotaku