Who is Toby Fox? Everything You Need to Know

Quick Facts

Also Known As: Robert F. Fox

Age: 32 Years, 32 Year Old Males

Born Country: United States

Computer Engineers American Men

Height: 1.75 m

U.S. State: New Hampshire

More Facts

education: Northeastern University

awards: 2016 · Undertale - BAFTA Games Award for Story
2015 · Undertale - The Game Award for Games For Change
2015 · Undertale - The Game Award for Best Independent Game
2015 · Undertale - The Game Award for Best Role Playing Game

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Childhood & Early Life

Toby Fox was born on October 11, 1991, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a middle class family. He was an avid game lover since his early days. He would spend hours playing video games. Some of his favorite games were role-playing games, including ‘Earthbound.’.

In 2000, Toby, along with his brothers, tried his hand at video game development. He used the software ‘RPGmaker,’ but never quite managed to create any game.

The Japanese game ‘Earthbound’ had three versions, but only one found its way into the American gaming consoles. Toby, obsessed with the game and miffed at the low popularity, turned to internet to find more ‘Earthbound’ lovers like him. He joined several fan communities and used the alias ‘Radiation.’ He joined hands with several other online gamers to create his own hacks for the game.

The hacks created by him were amateur, but had some very interesting ideas; Toby sent them to several contests run by fan communities of the game. During high school, Toby developed interest in music and started learning on his own. After he uploaded a few of his musical samples, he was hired to make music for the popular comic ‘Homestuck.’ His work was immensely loved by the people associated with ‘Homestuck’ and this gave him further confidence to design his very own role playing game.

He was inspired by the Japanese role-playing games and got his hands on the games that had not released outside of Japan. This led him to work on creating his very first game.

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Career

Around 2012, he started with the idea of creating his very own role playing game. He wanted to do it differently than any other American video game, so he took inspiration from the Japanese game ‘Shin Megami Tensei.’ In the Japanese game, the player could talk to the monster he was facing, so as to know more about the enemy that he was about to fight.

Wanting to further expand this concept, Toby began designing a unique battle experience that allowed the gamers to defeat enemies with more ways than just fighting them head-to-head. Expanding his imagination further, Toby decided that if the players resort to only violence to kill the enemy, they would have to face repercussions.

As the game began to take shape inside Toby’s head, more and more characters popped up. Toby designed most of the characters as fun parodies of clichés that were regularly prevalent in the American role-playing games of that time. At the centre of his plot, there was a battle mechanism, while the rest aspects of the game, including characters and their motivations, were ‘out of the box.’

He designed his leading character as a symbol for entire humanity and did not give it any particular name. It was simply called ‘the human’ so that more people could connect with the character on an emotional level. Furthermore, the player is referred in the game as ‘you’, which was another expository message about what themes he wanted to convey to his players.

Toby also challenged the very clichéd tropes of the role-playing games where the protagonists are subjected to follow a narrow straightforward path to attain their goals. Toby included very subtle easter-eggs within the game to make it more ‘alive’ and to make the gamer feel as a part of the entire process.

After finally finishing the demo of the game ‘Undertale,’ Toby started looking out for funds and sent the blueprint to several of his friends from the industry and his online communities. The game got a positive response, but Toby knew that acquiring the funds for the same was going to be a very difficult task as the idea was very unusual.

He launched a crowd-funding campaign for the game on Kickstarter on June 25, 2013, and set a target of $5,000. In his campaign, Toby highlighted the factors that made the game different from others, and this helped him gain more attention. Toby was not sure about the success of the campaign in the initial stages, but it somehow became a huge success and by the time the campaign ended, the game had collected $51,124 - ten times the target amount!

Toby started working harder to make sure the game provides the best game-playing experience to the gamers’ he also hired a few experts to help him finish his vision in the due time. The game finally released in September 2015, to critical and commercial acclaim.

Initially, it attracted very few people due to the lack of effective promotion, but with the help of online communities and word of mouth publicity, the game started reaching more and more people. The game received overwhelming response from gaming publications; some even called it a cult game. The review aggregator site ‘Metacritic’ gave ‘Undertale’ a score of 92/100 and announced that it was the third highest ranked game released in 2015.

By February 2016, the game had already sold more than 1 million copies. The game won many awards and nominations. ‘Zero Punctuation’ and ‘The Jimquisition’ named it ‘the Game of the Year.’ On ‘GameFAQs,’ it won the ‘Best Game Ever’ poll.

Toby is a contributor to the magazine ‘A Profound Waste of Time’. In 2017, he was hired to compose the music for the game ‘Hiveswap.’

Family & Personal Life

Toby Fox and Andrew Hussie, the creator of the popular comic strip ‘Homestuck,’ are good friends. Toby finished the design for ‘Undertale’ in Andrew’s basement.

Toby Fox Biography