#think about it. this song was first in a edgy earthbound halloween hack toby made when he was a teenager

[chickenmcnuggies]

Megalovania - From the Undertale live 5th year anniversary concert

#audio #undertale #im pretty sure this is the last audio post i can upload before tumblr slaps my pizza hands away with it's weird audio post limit #so i think it was legally required to be megalovania #think about it. this song was first in a edgy earthbound halloween hack toby made when he was a teenager #now it's in his smash hit indie game; smash bros; and basically the dudes fucking magnum opus #undertale concert

[maxsmusicmacrology]

Artist Profile: Toby Fox

Many of you may be most familiar with Toby Fox as “the guy who made Undertale”, or maybe as “the guy who made Megalovania”. The latter is actually a surprisingly useful way to think of the man, as the journey of Megalovania is wound very closely to the journey of Toby Fox. Just trust me on this part.

In the mid 00’s, Fox was a teenager frequenting Starman.net, a popular forum for the game EarthBound and the other titles in the Mother series, under the username “Radiation”. He created two ROM hacks of the game, releasing the first one in 2006, but his much more successful and influential hack was the EarthBound Halloween Hack, a submission to a 2008 Halloween-themed competition run by Starman.net.

After Fox rose to popularity, he went on to say that he’s not very proud of the hack, and in a deleted 2016 tweet he referred to it as a “bad rom hack with swears”. Having played through it, it’s an apt description- several of the fights are incredibly unbalanced and the villain drops a few slurs- but I don’t believe the hack should be entirely written off either.

In 2008, hacking new music into EarthBound was incredibly difficult, so both composing original music using the EarthBound soundfont and getting it to play in the game was an impressive achievement. While the game certainly has the usual Halloween aesthetic, full of pumpkins and zombies and ghosts, the real horror of the game is psychological, creating a much more fascinating story than a traditional halloween slasher. The final villain is consumed by grief after the death of his son and the estrangement of his wife, becoming a broken man who turns to violence— which are the exact same themes that would later be explored through Asgore when Fox would go on to make Undertale.

Anyway, this was the first and original appearance of Megalovania.

In 2009, Andrew Hussie launched his webcomic Homestuck on mspaintadventures.com, his fourth and final work to be published on the site. It ran until ending 2016 (with Epilogues launching a few years later), and is best known for having possibly the worst fandom in modern history until people started losing interest in 2013. Its second most notable characteristic is how heavily it embraced its online medium, including not just text and images but also gifs, animations with music, and even little interactive games. Over the comic’s seven year run over 500 pieces were written as part of Homestuck’s discography by a variety of artists, and while only a few dozen were included as part of the comic, all of them were made available online through Bandcamp under the Homestuck umbrella.

Toby Fox joined the music team in 2010 with two contributions to the comic’s fourth album, and from there he went on to be their most prolific contributor. From 2010-2016 Homestuck published roughly 90 of Fox’s songs, and he also hosted and managed a contest that led to nearly 60 fan contributed pieces being published. After Homestuck ended, Toby Fox went on to be one of the composers for the various spin off titles: Hiveswap Act One, Hiveswap Friendsim, and Pesterquest, so it seems he has no intent to leave the Homestuck universe anytime soon.

Undertale’s soundtrack was highly praised through its use of leitmotifs (and trust me, I’ll be talking about that plenty later on), but some of his tracks written for Homestuck make even better use of their motifs and reach some fairly complex heights. This video goes through Descend, which ended up during a critical moment during the early comic, and lists the twenty seven songs sampled during.

Of course, these aren’t just empty motifs for fun. The characters introduced thus far all have various themes associated with them, each motif bringing to mind the characters, their factions, and their histories. This is musical storytelling done through completely instrumental songs, and it is fantastically done. Several of his tracks do this, Jade’s medium entrance theme Umbral Ultimatum samples three songs she’d already appeared in, and his final track for the comic’s main run was a glorious melody of several prior battle themes.

Anyway, in 2010 he published the second appearance of MeGaLoVania, which was used during the [S] Wake animation and appeared on a 2011 album.

In 2012, Toby Fox contributed to an EarthBound fan album called “I miss you”, organized by bandcamp user sleepytime Jesse. He contributed four tracks, including Fallen Down (which would later feature in Undertale) and a remix of Megalovania. This isn’t a major milestone in his career like his EarthBound hacks or Homestuck, but I think it says a lot that he loves EarthBound and its community so much that he’d compose songs for a small fan album.

In 2015, Undertale came out and took the internet by storm. Like it or hate it, it was everywhere you looked for a while, from every gaming channel covering it to endless quoting on Reddit or Tumblr. Fox made the majority of the game himself, which of course includes making the soundtrack. There are a total of one hundred and one songs, and it would not surprise me if every single one of them (except Megalovania) was tied to all the others through some web of samples, remixes, and motifs.

Oh yeah, the third version of Megalovania is here, once again featuring as a final battle theme.

Once again, Fox uses motifs expertly as a form of storytelling. Let’s take a look at the track ASGORE, which is entirely created from other songs. The opening is bergentrückung, the intro theme that plays before the battle starts. That flows into Heartache, the battle theme of his ex-wife Toriel, showing that even after she left him, she’s still important enough to be part of his main theme. It also includes the Game Over theme, guiding the player to remember that it was his voice encouraging to continue playing when they failed, urging them forward only to reach him, as well as Undyne’s theme, who looks up to and idolizes him without knowing the truth of who he is.

The entire game is like this. If the player decides to turn evil, they gain a genocide motif that appears in some of the genocide-only bosses. The true final boss is foreshadowed through His Theme during important moments. Undyne and Alphys end up dating in the true ending, and in the genocide run Undyne resurrects herself from the brink of death while Alphys’s melody plays.

Fox’s music makes itself special by being so connected. His songs call back and call forward to other songs, making each of them important in some way or another. The Homestuck and Undertale soundtracks feel holistic, they’re not just “songs that happen to be written by the same guy”, they’re united soundtracks where every song has a greater meaning than just the scene they play over. Hell, even the Homestuck and Undertale soundtracks reference each other, and not just through Megalovania. Another Medium from the latter soundtrack samples Doctor from the former, and the final battle theme Collide samples Death By Glamour.

He’s currently working on his new game Deltarune, the first chapter of which (and its soundtrack) are available for free on PC and various consoles. The music already slaps, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Anyway, the fourth and (as of now final) version of Megalovania was included into none other than Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, added into the game alongside a Sans costume for Mii fighters.

This, in my opinion, is nothing short of incredible. Toby Fox went from a Nintendo fan who made a “bad rom hack with swears” for a game he liked, and now his music is appearing in one of the largest gaming franchises of all time. Shoot for the stars, everyone.

I think this is the part where I’m supposed to give a track listing, but come on, you’ve been reading. 90 Homestuck tracks and 101 Undertale tracks, plus everything before and after and in between. Fortunately, his page on the Undertale wiki has his entire discography listed, so I’m going to take the easy way out and link that.

https://undertale.fandom.com/wiki/Toby_Fox#Discography

He has done and has planned a few other projects, but I think the right place to end off is by mentioning his contribution to Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield, the Battle Tower theme. This is notable not only for being an awesome song that he composed for a massive franchise, but because it samples one of his early contributions to the Homestuck fandom. I am of course talking about The Baby Is You, an “opera” he wrote as a fan contribution to protest forum rules, which was subsequently banned from even being mentioned on said forum. Not only is this another example of all Fox’s projects fitting in with each other, it’s also a nearly decade-old callback to an obscure edgy joke he made and then hid as an easter egg (or an afikoman for you Jewish folk) in an official Nintendo title.

And I think that’s beautiful.

#toby fox #earthbound #homestuck #undertale #nintendo #radiation #artist profile #music