“One day, I randomly read about arrays, and realised I could program a text system using them,” he tells us.
In fact, his initial inspiration for this early experiment came while he was casually browsing Wikipedia. The ironic twist is that the first seeds of Undertale were sown from conflict, growing from a battle system Fox had programmed in GameMaker Studio. For once, you can talk to these creatures. You can befriend, rather than fight, the game’s bosses. Now, that would be interesting.” Indeed, when Fox was looking to raise funds to continue the development of Undertale, the modest description he chose for the Kickstarter page posited it as ‘a traditional roleplaying game where no one has to get hurt.’ In truth, his game was anything but traditional, although he got the second part right. But to play Undertale is to find a game that seems to have spawned from the same line of thinking as that oft-misquoted conclusion: “If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances. Outwardly, there would seem to be little to connect those two facts.
Toby Fox was almost two-and-a-half years old in March 1994, the month Edge’s infamous Doom review was published.
