Toby Fox's Real Name: Toby Fox

Quick answer: He is known as Toby Fox, the developer and composer behind Undertale and Deltarune. AllMusic gives his birth as October 11, 1991, in Manchester, New Hampshire, and a Library of Congress record agrees. That library record also lists the form Robert F. "Toby" Fox, implying Toby is a nickname. That longer form appears in only one qualifying source.

Real name and early life

PC Gamer, republishing an Edge magazine feature from 2017, says Fox was "almost two-and-a-half years old" in March 1994, which matches the 1991 birth year. He told Edge he played the SNES game Earthbound at four. "It helped me learn to read," he said, "and also transformed my brain forever." By about 11 he was a regular on the Earthbound fan site starmen.net, and in high school he built Earthbound ROM hacks. He said friends from that site now run Fangamer, which sells his merchandise.

Northeastern University's games program lists Fox among its alumni and says he graduated in 2014. The Library of Congress note says he studied environmental science there.

Career highlights

AllMusic says he wrote music for Andrew Hussie's web comic Homestuck, a project he joined as a high school senior in 2009. He later co-composed the score for Hiveswap (2017), a game based on Homestuck.

Undertale began as a battle system he programmed in GameMaker Studio. He told Edge the idea came after he "randomly read about arrays" and realized he could build a text system with them. In June 2013 he launched a Kickstarter campaign seeking $5,000 and raised ten times as much. The game launched in September 2015, and AllMusic says it sold a million copies by the following April. He developed the game and wrote its electronic keyboard-based score, which was released on the Materia label in 2016.

His soundtrack for Deltarune Chapter 1 (2018) reached No. 41 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart, and Chapter 2 (2021) reached No. 11 on the Soundtracks chart. AllMusic says he composed music for the Nintendo game Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (2022). Later Deltarune releases included Chapters 3 and 4 (2025) and Chapter 5 (2026), whose soundtrack reached the Top Three of the Independent Albums chart. In 2026 he also returned to Hiveswap for Act 3.

Name notes for searchers

Toby is the name he uses on all his games and albums. A Library of Congress record cross-references him as Fox, Robert F. (Video game developer), but no other qualifying source we checked gives that form. Searches for the Undertale composer usually pair his name with the game, since Toby Fox is a fairly common name.