undertale is a game made by toby fox in 2015. i remember right around when it came out... i was 15, still in high school, still profoundly mentally ill but not in as dire of a condition as i had been before. i remember bringing my laptop to my best friend's house and playing it there together with him. i remember it was close-ish to halloween - i wasn't able to buy it immediately on release because i had to ask my mom's permission. and wow, what an experience.
 
looking back, even playing it that day carries so much meaning to me, in part because of the game and in part because of the context i was playing it in. i rarely want to be a teenager again, but i will admit that i wish i could go back and do that day again.
 
well, i haven't talked to that friend in quite some time. his family has sold the house i spent so much time in. my interest raged on throughout highschool, but eventually dropped off as i started college, started dating, had various interests come and go throughout the year.
 
but still, still, i remember that sweet moment. i hold it close to me.

i'm writing this as i watch the 10th anniversary stream. wow am i feeling a lot.
 
it's interesting, right, the things you liked as a kid. i feel like most of the time, i revisit things i used to love, and it's just like, yeah, that was pretty awesome when i was a kid. undertale's one of those things that still hits as hard at 25 as it did at 15. hell, i still pogged when i realized the newer DDR cabinets have undertale music in them. so so so good.
 
i won't get into my own dark and tortured backstory, but that era of my life was... difficult. i was deeply suicidal, constantly getting myself in trouble, and overall a nihilist in the most miserable possible interpretation of the word. initially, i was interested in undertale because i thought it was an rpgmaker horror game, which was one of my great loves - OFF and yume nikki had been my bread and butter in middle school, and i was looking forward to finding a weird, offputting new toy to deal with. the entire time i was in the ruins, i was expecting toriel to be some kind of evil child-eating monster. imagine my surprise when her role as the doting maternal figure was played straight! by time i reached snowdin, i was enjoying myself too much for it to even register that this wasn't what i thought i was getting into at all.
 
by the end of the game, i was obsessed. i finished almost the entire game in one sitting, went home, and replayed it again to get the pacifist ending. i was delighted by the storytelling, the music, the battle mechanics, the character writing. i don't know how many times i replayed it, though i do think i was too guilty to reset my pacifist run more than a few times. i even tried the no mercy route and was quite proud of myself for getting past undyne, though i eventually had to call it quits on the sans fight (go figure).
 
during class, i filled sketchbooks with undertale fanart. i went on tumblr and even ran a dedicated sans blog, because, you know, 15 year olds are predictable and all that. i had so much fun fleshing out my headcanons. i even remember drawing a picture of chara during therapy that my therapist liked so much, she asked to keep and hang up on her wall.
 
eventually - i think it was a matter of a few years, though my memory of that time is pretty bad - i ran out of steam, and slowly, i moved onto other things. i remember playing deltarune chapter 1 when it first came out, though i wasn't enraptured by it the way i was undertale. (now, with the release of chapters 4 & 5, i firmly believe deltarune is just as good, if not better - i'll have to wait and see, since undertale has the advantage of being a finished game.)
 
now, presumably because my life doesn't suck as much as it did when i was in high school, i'm not struck with the same fervor for fandom spaces that i once was. i got pretty close with the latest deltarune chapters, though. that's another story, maybe one that will be exciting enough to make another dedicated neocities page for... hmmm...
 
next time i visit my parents, i'm going to go through my old sketchbooks and make a dedicated Memories subpage here. i'll scan some of the most interesting stuff i made, write up some of my old headcanons, and overall reminisce.