Chapter 1: Beginnings, Influences, and Early Works
Early Life
October 11, 1991 - 2005
Toby Fox's Yearbook Photo
Toby Fox was born as Robert F. Fox on October 11, 1991 in Manchester, New Hampshire.
He initially took music lessons for the trumpet and the piano.
He intially dropped off on music, but in middle mchool started teaching himself Piano by ear, wanting to be able to play songs from video game soundtracks that he liked, such as Secret of Mana and Super Mario RPG.
At age 4, he was introduced to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game EARTHBOUND, created by Shigesato Itoi and published by Nintendo. He was introduced to it by his brother, who received the game for his birthday, and that Toby watched play.
At around age 5, he discovered the bullet hell RPG series Touhou Project, known for it's difficulty but catchy music.
In around 2000, Toby Fox and his three brothers downloaded the game maker program RPG Maker 2000. At the time, RPG Maker 2000 was officially available in the Japanese language, so they downloaded an unofficial English fan translation of the program, made by a russian fan known as "Don Miguel"
They messed around and made various games, ones that Toby mentions includes "Toby's Quest", "Toby's Adventure", "Toby's Adventure 2", but they never got really far. In one particular game, he appeared as a character who was a pirate with a green coat called "Green Mage Toby" who could put enemies in an "irritated state" during battle. That game's main character was named "Ralsei", which stuck with Toby.
Joins Starmen.net
December 7, 2003
Toby's Starmen.net Profile
On December 7, 2003, Toby Fox joined an Earthbound fan forum known as starmen.net, adopting the name "Radiation". Starmen.net was a fan forum for the Earthbound community that was founded in February 1999. The site was a hub for fanart, music, hacks of the game that used it to create new content, and more, and hosted regular community events and contests.
Toby Fox's First Published Game: Arn's Winter Quest
January 1, 2006
Gameplay of Arn's Winter Quest from 2007.
On January 1st, 2006, Toby Fox released Arn's Winter Quest, a romhack of Earthbound, on the Starmen.net forums. It was created for starmen.net's Holiday Funfest event. Developed over the course of 2 months, it has a rather nonsensical story.
In it, you play as a character called Arn, who lives in a cabin, when Ness, the original character from Earthbound, crashes into Arn's cabin, and the two go on a strange adventure. It's filled with lots of nonsensical dialogue, with many references and in-jokes in Earthbound. This hack does not contain any custom music, but some existing Earthbound songs have significantly changed instrumentation.
Toby Fox's comment on the gameplay video above.
"OFF" Circulates Online
May 14, 2008 - 2011
Gameplay of the original version of OFF.
On May 14, 2008, "OFF", a game by Martin Georis and Alias Conrad Coldwood, two developers from Belgium operating as the team "Unproductive Fun Time", was released online for free. The game was made in the RPG Maker engine, and is known for it's surreal tone, atmosphere, storytelling, and soundtrack. The game originally was released in the French language, although it received a fan translation that was given official sanction by the developers.
Around the time of the English translation, Toby Fox began playing it, and it, it's storytelling, and style of music, would leave an impact on him.
The song "Pepper Steak" from the original OFF soundtrack.
Toby's Second Romhack: "Radiation's Halloween Hack" (and the first appearance of MEGALOVANIA)
January 1, 2009
Gameplay of Radiation's Halloween Hack, uploaded in 2024.
Released for Starmen.net's Halloween Funfest event, Radiation's Halloween Hack, alternatively known as the EarthBound Halloween Hack, was Toby Fox's second released romhack. It is known for it's dark themes, in which the player takes control of a bounty hunter, called Varik who hunts down a mysterious creative that "mutilated and ate a little girl’s parents". In it's listing on ROMhacking.net, Toby describes it as "one of the most traumatic and horrifying games in the world", and contains mature themes and adult language.
Notably, this ROMhack is the first appearance of the song "MEGALOVANIA", which was created after attempting to use the song "Megalomania" from the game Live a Live, however, after encountering difficulties, yelled something into a microphone and transcribed that into a song.
"MEGALOVANIA" as it appeared in Radiation's Halloween Hack
The Beginning of Homestuck
April 13, 2009
The first page of Homestuck
On April 13, 2009, Andrew Hussie releases the first page of Homestuck on his website "MS Paint Adventures". Homestuck was an online webcomic that fully embraced the possibilities of the internet at the time, integrating a variety of mediums including images, chat logs, interactive games, animation, music, etc. Due to a variety of reasons, including elements using Adobe Flash and decay by it's eventual owner, VIZ Media, the Homestuck website is largely unusable. However, fans have made efforts to archive it in it's entirety.
Toby Fox joins the Homestuck Music Team
Around 2009
Video featuring Toby Fox and Erik "Jit" Scheele playing piano together at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May 2013.
In April 2009, Andrew Hussie started the Homestuck music team and posted on the MS Paint Adventure forums looking for musicians within the community to join. While Toby Fox, at this time a senior in high school, did not initially apply to join, Hussie took notice of Fox's work both through his posts elsewhere on the forums, and through his Earthbound hacks. Toby Fox is thus recruited for the music team.
A Certain Fever Dream
Around 2011
"In 2011, when I was away at school, I got very sick. I ended up having a terrible fever and couldn’t get any medicine for it, and while I was sleeping I had a vivid dream about the ending to a game. Since then… I felt like I had to make the game with that ending." - Toby Fox
Quote taken from an article published by Nintendo on the Nintendo Switch News app within the Nintendo Switch operating system. Text effect was created with the assistance of Google Gemini 2.5 Pro
This dream, which Toby Fox describes in the quote, has stuck with him for a very long time and will form the basis of his game currently in development, DELTARUNE.
