Toby Fox · PC (Windows, Mac) · 2015 · Inspired by: EarthBound, Touhou Project, classic JRPGs
Undertale was built by one person in Game Maker and used the visual language of SNES JRPGs to deliver a game that systematically interrogated the assumptions underlying every retro RPG the player might have loved — particularly the convention that combat was the primary means of progress.
Toby Fox had no professional game development background when he created Undertale; he was primarily known as a musician who had contributed fan arrangements to the Homestuck webcomic. He taught himself Game Maker and built Undertale over two and a half years, following a successful Kickstarter that raised $51,124 against a $5,000 goal. The game's visual aesthetic — character portraits, overworld sprites, battle UI — was modelled directly on SNES-era JRPGs, particularly EarthBound and the Mother series, which Fox cited as his primary influence. The game's central innovation was a combat system that offered genuine pacifist alternatives to every encounter. Players could spare, comfort, flirt with, or flee from every enemy in the game without fighting. The bullet-hell combat sequences — in which the player's heart-shaped token dodged enemy attacks in the battle screen — existed to create tension during non-violent resolution attempts as well as during actual fights. A pacifist run was mechanically more demanding than a violent one: players had to learn each enemy's specific non-combat trigger, which required genuine engagement with the game's world rather than bypassing it. This design deconstructed the RPG genre's fundamental assumption — that killing enemies was the appropriate and expected means of progress — by making the alternative both possible and rewarding. Players who completed pacifist runs received a different ending and a deeper story than those who fought through the game, inverting the standard relationship between combat efficiency and narrative reward. The game sold over 3.5 million copies and was named by numerous publications as a candidate for the best game of 2015.
Undertale is in constant dialogue with the games that inspired it. Its battle system is a JRPG battle system. Its overworld structure is an EarthBound overworld. Its enemy designs reference the strange, anthropomorphic monsters of classic JRPGs. And then it asks: why do you kill all of these? The game is not hostile to its genre predecessors; it loves them, demonstrably and specifically. What it interrogates is their unexamined conventions — particularly the convention that progress is measured in defeated enemies.
By making pacifism mechanically possible and narratively superior, Undertale forced players to notice something they had never thought about: that JRPGs taught players to reflexively kill everything they encountered without considering alternatives. The game does not condemn this — the genocide route, in which players kill every enemy in the game, is one of three main routes and provides its own complete narrative — but it makes the choice visible in a way that changes what every prior JRPG meant retrospectively.
Undertale is the most successful single-author game in the indie revival, and its success is directly related to its authorial coherence. Fox's writing, soundtrack, and game design are inseparable: the game's emotional impact depends on music arriving at precise moments, on characters whose dialogue matches their mechanical behaviour, on a story whose tone shifts are supported by aesthetic changes that a single author can coordinate in ways a team cannot. The soundtrack in particular — which shifts from lighthearted chiptune to orchestral grandeur to silence at exactly the right moments — is integrated into the experience in a way that separately contracted music rarely achieves.
The EarthBound influence extends beyond visual style. Mother/EarthBound was itself the work of a primary creator, Shigesato Itoi, who wrote the entire script and controlled the game's tone with an unusually singular voice. Fox absorbed this not just as an aesthetic reference but as a model of how a game could feel authored rather than assembled. Undertale's most powerful sequences depend on this authorial control — a moment of comedy followed immediately by genuine melancholy works only because the person writing both understood how they related to each other.