Megalovania — Toby Fox (2015)

Why this song

If you have played Undertale, you link it to a grinning skeleton waiting at the end of the game's cruellest route. If you haven't, you have still heard it: in memes, in remixes, in Smash Bros. In 2024 Guinness certified it as the most-streamed video game track on Spotify.

The strange part is that you know it after four notes. So here is the question: what do those four notes have that means nothing else is needed?

Historical context

Toby Fox started out writing music for mods, fan-made reworkings of existing games. In 2008 he was making one for a Halloween contest based on EarthBound, a Super Nintendo role-playing game. For the final boss he wanted a track from another game, but it was too hard to transcribe. So he wrote a new one.

The title blends two words: megalomania and Transylvania, for Halloween. Three years later he brought it back, arranged with guitars, for the web comic Homestuck.

Photo: Monathephantom, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2015 he released Undertale. He had made almost all of it alone: the design, the writing and every piece of music, composed in FL Studio, a computer program, with no formal music training. Megalovania became the theme of Sans, the skeleton you fight at the end of the route where you kill everyone. The soundtrack came out the same day as the game.

Musical characteristics

It opens with a synthesizer bass on its own. Listen to what it does: two identical notes, a jump to a much higher note, and a quick fall. A short gesture that you recognise at once and that keeps coming back is a riff.

Now follow the first note of each round. The top part stays the same, but the starting note drops a little every bar: D, C, B, B flat. Four steps right next to each other, one per bar. Stepping down like that, without skipping any note, builds tension, because the ear expects the staircase to end.

The riff never stops. When a figure repeats over and over while everything else changes above it, it is called an ostinato. Here it is the floor the whole piece stands on.

Sixteen seconds in, everything else arrives: drums, more synths and a melody on top. The riff has not changed; what has changed is how many parts are playing. Sharing the same music out between different instruments is the arrangement, and that is why this piece can work for orchestra, rock band or synthesizer without getting lost.

The sound looks back to the Super Nintendo role-playing games that influenced Fox, like EarthBound: dry, bright, synthetic timbres. That style is called chiptune.

Hard data: D minor, 4/4, 120 BPM, 2:36. The form is a chain of sections over the same riff, which loops back to the start at the end.

Trivia and curiosities

• The riff existed seven years before the game. The same idea appears in the 2008 mod, in Homestuck in 2011 and in Undertale in 2015, arranged differently each time. A good theme can be recycled if you change how you dress it.

• It was born from failing to transcribe something else. Fox wanted to use "Megalomania" from Live A Live and couldn't work it out by ear. He wrote his own, inspired by the final-boss theme of Brandish 2. Composing by imitation is a method, not cheating.

• The melody started as yelling. Fox said he recorded himself yelling whatever he felt like and then transcribed it. The transcription took "forever"; the composing, about thirty minutes. The voice is the first instrument, even for someone who composes on a computer.

• The end is exactly the beginning. The last seconds are the riff alone again, at the same volume as the start. It is built to join onto itself: in the game the fight lasts as long as you take, and the music can't run out first.

• It has been played by a circus, an orchestra and electric guitars. There is a rock version for the rhythm game Gitadora, orchestral concert versions, and a circus company performed it for Pope Francis in 2022. If a riff survives all those arrangements, the musical idea was strong.

Guided listening

The timings are from the official audio in Resources.

• 0:00 — the riff, alone. A single low synthesizer. Notice how the first note of each round drops one step: D, C, B, B flat.
• 0:16 — everything comes in at once. Eight bars later the volume jumps. The riff is still underneath, unchanged: what is new is the drums and what plays on top. That is arrangement.
• 1:52 — the colour changes. A new, more restrained section starts and a guitar takes the lead. Listen for whether the riff is still underneath.
• 2:24 — back to the start. The riff alone again, at the same volume as second zero. It is ready to begin again without you hearing the join.

Classroom activities

• Play: the riff on bass or keyboard, only the four starting notes of each bar, D, C, B and B flat, in crotchets. Once that works, add the high jump. The full ensemble score is in the class resources.

• Rhythm: while half the class plays the riff, the other half keeps a rock beat with body percussion: stomp on 1 and 3, clap on 2 and 4.

• Analyse: a closed question. Listen from 0:00 to 0:30 and say what changes at second 16 and what doesn't. Justify it with what you hear, not with what you see.

• Create: invent a four-note riff and repeat it, moving the first note one step down each time. Steal the procedure, not the piece.

Key vocabulary

• Riff — riff (un gesto corto que se repite y se reconoce)
• Ostinato — ostinato (un motivo que se repite sin parar)
• Arrangement — arreglo
• Chiptune — chiptune (el sonido de los videojuegos antiguos)

Resources

Official audio — Toby Fox – Topic channel, from the Undertale soundtrack (Materia Collective).

Piano tutorial, easy version — PHianonize. Start with the right hand without drowning.

Guitar tutorial — Marin Music Center, a thirteen-minute explained lesson.

Bass tutorial — Chris Marolf, just the riff, which is exactly what to learn first.

Drum tutorial — EasyDrumLesson.

• Ensemble score — Fantasy Sheets arrangement on MuseScore: https://musescore.com/fantasysheets/scores/3383276
• Images — Toby Fox in 2016, photo by Stephen Georg, CC BY-SA 4.0; hall for the Undertale tenth anniversary concert, photo by Monathephantom, CC BY 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.