From a $5,000 Kickstarter to 290,000 Players: Toby Fox's Long Game

In the summer of 2013, a young composer best known for writing music for a webcomic asked the internet for $5,000 to make a small role-playing game. He got $51,124 from 2,398 backers. Two years later that game, Undertale, came out and quietly rewired what players expected from an RPG.

Thirteen years on, Toby Fox is still at it. His second game, Deltarune, released its fifth chapter as a free update on 24 June 2026, and it drew more than 290,000 concurrent players on Steam, smashing the series' previous peak of 133,000. With two chapters still to come, Fox's slow, stubborn, chapter-by-chapter approach is now one of the great long-running stories in indie games.

The composer who learned to make games

Fox did not come from a games studio. As kids, he and his three brothers played around with RPG Maker 2000, starting more projects than they finished. In high school he made several ROM hacks of EarthBound, Nintendo's cult-classic RPG. From 2010, he became known as one of the composers for Homestuck, the sprawling webcomic.

So when he launched his Kickstarter, he had musical talent, a handful of hacks and very little formal game development experience. He built Undertale over 32 months in GameMaker: Studio, doing nearly everything himself apart from some of the art. The main artist was Temmie Chang, who drew most of the game's sprites and concept art.

Undertale: the RPG where you don't have to fight

Undertale came out on 15 September 2015 for Windows and OS X. Its hook was simple to say and radical in practice: every monster can be spared. You can talk, flirt, joke or simply refuse to fight, and the game remembers what you did, sometimes across playthroughs. Battles mix turn-based menus with bullet-hell dodging, so even mercy takes skill.

It sold at least 5 million copies, reached PlayStation 4 and Vita in 2017, Nintendo Switch in 2018 and Xbox One in 2021, and won the Audience Award at the 2016 IGF and an Award for Excellence at the Japan Game Awards 2018. Its characters escaped the game entirely: in September 2019, Sans became a Mii Fighter costume in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with a new arrangement of Megalovania, after director Masahiro Sakurai said he was a popular request.

Why did it land so hard? In our view, because it turned the most basic assumption of the genre into a question. Decades of RPGs had trained players to grind monsters for experience points without a second thought. Undertale made every one of those fights a choice with consequences, then wrote characters charming enough that hurting them felt genuinely bad. It was a game about kindness that never lectured, and a comedy that could turn devastating in a single line. It is easy to see why so many later indie RPGs wear its influence openly, from bullet-hell battles to monsters you can talk down instead of killing.

Deltarune: a fever dream, years in the making

Deltarune's origin is even stranger. Fox has said the idea came to him in a fever dream in 2011, while he was in college. He began work in 2012 but abandoned it before finishing the first room, and some of that early music ended up in Undertale instead.

The new game is set in a parallel universe to Undertale, with familiar faces in unfamiliar roles. Its release has been unusual by any standard:

• Chapter 1: free, 31 October 2018, on Halloween.
• Chapter 2: free, 17 September 2021.
• Chapters 3 and 4: the first paid release, 4 June 2025, on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch, plus a Switch 2 launch-day version on 5 June 2025.
• Chapter 5: a free update for owners, 24 June 2026.
• Chapter 6: planned for 2027; Fox has said it will release separately from Chapter 7, the last.

It is worth pausing on that schedule. Fox gave away the first two chapters for years before charging a cent, which turned them into one of the longest free demos indie games have ever seen and built an audience that was ready, wallet open, when Chapters 3 and 4 arrived. Then he made Chapter 5 free for existing owners. It is a model that rewards patience on both sides of the screen, and it only works because each chapter has felt worth the wait.

A bigger team, the same voice

Undertale was close to a one-person show. Deltarune is not, and it says a lot about Fox that he grew a team without diluting his style. Temmie Chang returned as main artist. Robert Sephazon joined as producer in early 2024. The console ports of the first two chapters were handled by 8-4, and guest composers on the soundtracks include Laura Shigihara and Lena Raine.

Fox's own role has shifted too. He has said he uses speech-to-text software because of wrist problems, and other team members now handle programming. Writing, music and design still carry his fingerprints everywhere: the jokes that land a beat late, the sudden turns into sincerity, the characters who seem like gags until they break your heart.

Records, reviews and a devoted fandom

Deltarune's numbers keep climbing with each release. The free Chapter 1 and 2 demo drew around 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, far above anything Undertale managed. When Chapters 3 and 4 launched in 2025, Deltarune was among Steam's highest-grossing games, and it was the best-selling digital game on Switch 2 at the console's launch. Chapters 1 to 4 hold a 100% recommendation rate on OpenCritic.

For context, 290,000 simultaneous players is a figure many big-budget releases never reach on Steam, and Deltarune hit it with a free chapter of a pixel-art RPG made by a small team.

The fandom is the engine. Undertale grew through fan art, music covers and theory videos, and Deltarune inherited all of it. Every chapter launch is treated as an event, and every new character is drawn, remixed and analysed within hours.

By the numbers

• $5,000: Undertale's Kickstarter goal. It raised $51,124.
• 32 months: Undertale's development time.
• 5 million+: Undertale copies sold.
• 5 of 7: Deltarune chapters released as of November 2026.
• 290,000+: concurrent Steam players for Deltarune Chapter 5, against a previous record of 133,000.

What to watch, and what to play

The next milestone is Chapter 6, planned for 2027. Fox has hinted that work on the final chapter may begin before the end of 2026, but has given no date for it.

If you have never played either game, start with Undertale: it is short, cheap and best experienced knowing as little as possible. Then try Deltarune, whose first two chapters are free. For another singular solo creation, read our features on Stardew Valley (here) and Balatro (here). Deltarune is on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2; Undertale is on PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch. Both are best played knowing nothing at all.