Toby Fox

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 30th of October 2018, Toby Fox asked fans of his game Undertale to check its official Twitter account in 24 hours. The next day, he released the first chapter of Deltarune for free and called the whole thing a "survey". The stunt suits a creator who is secretive, who does not usually give interviews, and who tends to let his work speak for him. Fox, whose full name is Robert F. Fox, is an American game developer and composer. How did an environmental science student become a household name among role-playing game fans? Why does a quiet creator keep surprising his audience with free gifts? And how does one song written for a hobby project end up inside a Nintendo fighting game?

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• 2. Piano And Hacks

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  Manchester, New Hampshire is where Robert F. Fox was born, on the 11th of October 1991. As a child he took music lessons, including piano and trumpet. By middle school he had decided to play piano again, and he taught himself to perform video game soundtracks by ear.

  In his teens, game making began as a family hobby. He and his brothers used RPG Maker to build their own role-playing games. In high school he moved on to ROM hacks, which are modified versions of existing console games. His early list includes Arn's Winter Quest, a Super Nintendo ROM hack from 2006, and the EarthBound Halloween Hack, a Halloween-themed rework of EarthBound released in 2008.

  Northeastern University is where he studied environmental science, graduating in 2014, a year before his first major game appeared.

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• 3. The Homestuck Break

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  In April 2009, the author Andrew Hussie opened a Music Contribution Team for his webcomic Homestuck, and Fox did not respond at first. Fox was in his senior year of high school. What caught Hussie's attention was something Fox did on his own. He began posting piano covers of the webcomic's music on the MS Paint Adventures forums.

  Fox went on to serve as production coordinator of the Homestuck soundtrack. He also composed a version of "Megalovania" for it. He later credited the project with giving him his first real experience with digital audio workstations, the software used to build recorded music. His connection to the webcomic stretched from 2009 to 2016, and it included an album called The Baby is You, made in 2010, for which he was writer, composer and vocalist.

  The webcomic's world kept calling him back. He composed the 2017 game Hiveswap: Act 1, and he returned for its second act in 2020.

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• 4. Undertale

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  More than 3.5 million copies of Undertale have been sold, a number that turned the 2015 role-playing game into what the source calls a "breakout hit" and a "pop-culture phenomenon". Fox built the game himself, apart from the art, and he also composed its soundtrack. For the visuals he recruited an artist, Temmie Chang. The character designs themselves came earlier. Fox sketched them in a notebook while he was in college.

  After release, a large fanbase gathered around the game. Fox said he did not mind when people disliked it, because it was "not for everyone". In 2016, the YouTube personality MatPat gifted a copy of Undertale to Pope Francis. That same year, Fox wrote that he still thought the game was "niche" and deserved an "8/10" review score. He also became a contributor to the magazine A Profound Waste of Time.

  The awards followed. Undertale earned nominations for a British Academy Game Award, three Game Awards and three D.I.C.E. Awards. Fox also landed on the 2018 Games Forbes 30 Under 30 list, when the game had sold over 2 million copies.

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• 5. Influences And Megalovania

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  Final Fantasy VI left Fox mesmerized, both by its music and by its atmosphere. Other Japanese role-playing games shaped him too, including EarthBound, Secret of Mana and Super Mario RPG. He looked up to the composer Yoko Shimomura in particular. Her song "Megalomania", written for Live A Live, struck him hardest.

  Fox planned to use a cover of that song in one of his games. Then he grew tired of transcribing it by ear, so he wrote a new piece instead and named it "Megalovania".

  The Touhou Project series found him at a very young age. In middle school he downloaded demo versions of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and Perfect Cherry Blossom. He played a piano version of the Perfect Cherry Blossom track "Necrofantasia" at his church's summer camp. He also names the Ace Attorney series as an inspiration, especially for the way it builds its characters.

  Undertale's success, especially in Japan, led Fox to meet Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Super Smash Bros. Sans, a character from Undertale, later arrived in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a Mii costume in downloadable content. The costume came with "Megalovania", and Fox supplied a fresh arrangement of it.

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• 6. Deltarune

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  The idea for Deltarune first came to Fox in 2011. A version took shape in 2012, but he abandoned it. The game that eventually appeared is set in a parallel universe to Undertale, and Fox said it would be "more enjoyable" for people who had finished that earlier game.

  When the first chapter appeared, Fox said he did not want to spend longer than seven years on the project. He hoped to assemble a team to help. Without one, he said, he had "absolutely no estimation of its completion".

  Several months after Chapter 1 became playable, he sounded more hopeful. "Slowly I'm writing and drawing it all out," he said, adding that he had already written about 50 songs beyond that first chapter.

  On the 17th of September 2021, he released the second chapter for free, explaining that "the world has been really tough for everybody recently". He was referring to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapters 3 and 4 arrived on the 4th of June 2025, bundled with the first two as a paid game. Owners of that version receive future chapters as free updates.

  Fox is working on Chapter 5, set for release in 2026. The plan calls for seven chapters in total.

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• 7. Guest Work

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  Game Freak's 2019 role-playing game Little Town Hero carries music by Fox, arranged by the Pokémon composer Hitomi Sato. Around the same period he wrote for smaller projects. He composed for Escaped Chasm, a short narrative game by Undertale artist Temmie Chang. He also contributed to other indie titles, including YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, Omori and Fields of Mistria.

  The Pokémon series itself came calling more than once. Fox composed a track for Pokémon Sword and Shield and multiple tracks for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. For the Indigo Disk expansion to Scarlet and Violet, he remixed Ed Sheeran's "Celestial".

  In 2024, Fox teamed up with the Japanese developer ZUN, creator of the series that had enchanted him as a child. Downloadable content for Touhou Danmaku Kagura Phantasia Lost included a track that blended the Touhou song "U.N - Owen Was Her?" with Undyne's Undertale boss theme, "Battle Against a True Hero".

  He has also worked as a voice actor. His debut came in 2023 in the animated series We Baby Bears, where he plays a skeleton named Jared in the episode "Polly's New Crew". He said it had "been a dream of his to be a voice actor in cartoons". In 2025, he voiced John Egbert in the Homestuck animated pilot, where he was credited as Toby "Radiation" Fox.

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• 8. Life Off Stage

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  Chronic pain in his wrist and hands regularly keeps Fox from programming and composing. He often relies on speech-to-text software to operate his computer. In September 2020, he named a flare-up of that pain as one factor in the delay of Deltarune's second chapter. Outside of his work, he is private and does not typically do interviews. He can also speak Japanese.

  Generosity is another thread in his career. On the 17th of September 2022, the merchandise company Fangamer, which had previously partnered with Fox on Undertale products, ran a charity auction on the Deltarune website. It was called the "Spamton Sweepstakes", and it raised money for the charity Child's Play.

  Fangamer and Fox later marked Undertale's tenth anniversary with a two day charity marathon livestream. Players worked through a modified version of the game. The stream raised more than 320,000 dollars for Doctors Without Borders.

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