tangentially related to that bad video about indie game marketing i shared the other day, it's a little wild to me how often you'll still see gaming pundits frame undertale blowing up as this random miracle. like it just came out of nowhere as this one-in-a-million random hit. like its creator wasn't known online as the most beloved composer for the most popular multimedia webcomic on the planet, a series that inspired droves of obsessed teenagers to descend upon anime cons while covered in grey body paint for years. you could, perhaps, argue that that helped
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in reply to @ponett's post:
this was the real reason undertale blew up. and also why gamefreak hired that man
you're thinking of a different nic cage-related homestuck song lol, it's this timeless classic that toby wrote https://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/nic-cage-song-2
me, clueless: "huh i wonder why the Undertale fandom made like a billion AUs like right away"
And people pushed it that way really early on! People would say "hey this guy who made music for Homestuck made a game" and I'd be like "wait are you saying homestuck had music"
a lot of gaming/culture/net journalism completely fails to acknowledge homestuck's existence, it's weird!! i wonder if that'll change in the next 10 years
haven't they heard that homestuck made this world? the podcast told me so
I hear actual real game devs to this day be like “Undertale came out of nowhere”, it’s not just the press! It’s very weird!
It had a fairly successful Kickstarter campaign too! "2,398 backers pledged $51,124" was pretty solid for 2013, I think.
YEAH people also seem to forget the successful kickstarter funded in large part by that homestuck fanbase??? not to mention the fans he had for his earlier creative work like his earthbound hacks. he had an audience and it multiplied from there when the game was good
A number of the circles I was in absolutely knew him well as a well known person from the Starmen.net forums along with all the Homestuck stuff, and this was for a while before Undertale was a thing. He really really wasn't some small nobody. Like, he was a well known person in multiple online communities and acting like he was some unknown nobody is terrible research at best and just intentionally misleading information at worst.
Toby fox was also brand manager of What Pumpkin, and the marketing experience shows especially with the regular social media correspondence leading up to release and the capacity to have a merch store open on day one of the demo.
uh, was he? not rachel/softowl, Andrew's girlfriend who managed most of the what pumpkin brand stuff?
the other type of "random success" is "did a thing while born into generational wealth"
In fairness, that was Hussie, whom Toby was living with at the time
I felt like while he was the composer Hussie liked the most (or at least trusted enough to do a lot of quick spur-of-the-moment music) a lot of people appreciated Tensei, Jit and Malcolm Brown (when he came back and did Rex Duodecim Angelus) just as much.
there were definitely others on the music team whose work people liked on a similar level, but idk, none of them seemed to have the level of presence in the broader fandom that toby did at the time. he got around
So, reading these comments, and... Yeah, I didn't know any of this. I have never read homestuck and what little I do know I most likely picked up through memes. It was only after the game came out that I knew anything about Toby's existence and the one other project people said he worked on, the Halloween Hack, so yeah, to me, Undertale "came out of no where." It's easy to think something dropped from the sky randomly one day when you don't know clumsy angels drop shit all the time.
The thing is that you're not a journalist or essayist that is expected to do research and know what you're talking about before making wild declarations.
Ah, that seems to be the key point I somehow missed reading the post. My apologies if I came off too harshly.