Hey all! It's late at night and I thought it'd be fun to do a quick writeup since I've seen a lot of confusion in YouTube comments and tweets, etc. Hopefully, this post will clear up some things for curious minds.

I'm sure everyone that has played the game is aware of "HIM", the music box character featured throughout the nights. This character was present in the original game as most of you all know, however, for this remake we drastically redesigned the character for a few reasons that I'll get into here.

The base reasoning for the drastic redesign is quite simple, and pretty faithful to the original game. Despite common suggestions, the character is not based on or inspired by Cakebear from Dormitabis. Believe it or not, I'd like to inform you all Cakebear was used in the original Five Nights to Remember before Dormitabis even existed.

Yes, of course the design is based on the "Take Cake" Freddy sprite from the FNaF 2 minigame... however the idea of "Cakebear" is very much a fan-created character, and it has always been something that has been toyed with in the community, most prominently being used by fangames.

When it came time to approach the character of HIM, it wasn't exactly an easy task. To be completely honest, my opinion was rather negative of the original design, and its further appearances in ONTR and The Diner were ones I didn't have fond thoughts about either.

So how do I make this character better? Similar to the way we changed Undying from FNaTI, I suggested to the team we completely redesign the character. Before this, we briefly toyed with the idea of keeping the character an endoskeleton, but things like that have already been done in other notable Fredbear games and I felt it would be better to move forward with something slightly different.

So, if we're going to redesign this character, what do we do for the new design? If you've paid attention to the post so far, you probably noticed I said the new design is still actually quite faithful to the original FNTR from 2015. Check this (now unlisted) video out that StellaWisps uploaded to promote the original 2015 game: https://youtu.be/gARG3a4xSyM?si=gyjqDiU_rhqCYzOE

This teaser trailer blatantly tells the viewer that the original intention of the HIM character was to be the endoskeleton of Cakebear (long before Dormitabis was even an idea), which is entirely the reason why the character looks the way he does in the new version. So no, we didn't take creative liberty with this one. I can't exactly speak for what the character became later in the original trilogy, as Stella probably intended to retcon HIM into something else as the series progressed. We chose to ignore that, as frankly, it's really hard to take that idea seriously with the design of the character in those games.

The choice to make him a robot on wheels is also pretty self-explanatory I think, as the character in the new game is intended to be the first robot ever made for the location. So to me, it's sensical that the technology for them being able to fully walk just was not there yet. I know some people won't like the design regardless of that, but I feel I should explain why it is the way it is.

TLDR: No, it's not a Dormitabis character, nor is it inspired by it at all. (The same goes for Bite, whose concept art and plans predated Dormitabis Remastered by a year or two I'm pretty sure.)

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.