Earlier this week, Undertale received a new patch that creator Toby Fox said would simply “fix bugs and increase compatibility.” And that was it. Until some handy players dug a little deeper and found that there might, just might, be more to the update than was first thought.
Undertale is great although not one of our best PC games.
WARNING: Undertale spoilers incoming.
Undertale was one of my favourite games of 2015. I fell in love with its world, its characters, its quirks – that you never need fight enemies, for example – and its story. If you played the game like I did, though, you might never have heard of the elusive character Gaster, not directly, but if you’re a dab hand at datamining you might’ve picked up some info via the game’s code.
Apparently, Gaster was a skeleton scientist – and possible sibling of Sans and Papyrus – who conducted experiments involving space and time. He’s said to have created an invention that he subsequently fell into and thereafter died. There is of course a massive rabbit hole that accompanies these theories which is worth delving into if you have time.
The new update brings with it new dialogue and an altered audio file that, again, according to some, points to Gaster’s existence. Most interestingly, Fox himself hinted at the possibility of something being hidden in the update – although still denied the existence of new content outright.
“BTW, just want to clarify, the lack of new content is in no way due to people datamining the game. No hard feelings towards those people,” says Fox via a series of tweets after the patch went live. “The only reason I tried to get people not to datamine is so fans could experience things before they were found in the code… Anyway, I have no problem with that kind of stuff now. After all, game hacking leads to things like fan translations, which are great.”
Thanks, Kotaku.