Indie dev explains how their forgotten 8-year-old Steam game suddenly became popular thanks to an Undertale mod

An indie developer has explained how their forgotten free Steam game from eight years ago suddenly became popular thanks to Undertale.

RetroSpecter, who says they’ve been making games for nearly a decade, recounted the story on the IndieDev Reddit page (as spotted by PC Gamer), explaining why a game they had made early in their career and no longer paid attention to had taken on a new life of its own.

The game, Crashphalt, is a 4-player competitive platformer where players use a ground pound move to create shockwaves in the terrain, in an attempt to knock opponents off the stage.

“While it didn’t set the world on fire, it let me learn the ropes of game dev from start to finish, led me to make many friends that I still keep up and work with, and is one of the many stepping stones that led me to working on games full time,” RetroSpecter explained.

“These days I don’t about Crashphalt too much. But every once and a while I revisit the Steam page to see if anyone is still playing.”

A few months ago, RetroSpecter noticed that while Crashphalt had around 10 reviews when it released back in 2018, it now had over 500 reviews on Steam, marked as ‘overwhelmingly positive’. What’s more, the vast majority of these reviews seemed to be making jokes and references to hit indie game Undertale, rather than mentioning Crashphalt itself.

After doing some investigation, the developer discovered that Crashphalt was being used for Undertale Together, a co-op mod for Undertale which lets two people play through the game together.

“The lucky game chosen”

While the general idea of the mod is that two players with copies of Undertale can play in co-op, some players have been sharing tutorials which allow one user to play co-op with another who doesn’t own a copy of the game, using Steam Remote Play.

Undertale doesn’t support Remote Play normally, so players have to download a game that does feature Remote Play and copy its files over to the Undertale install folder, at which point they can activate Remote Play in Undertale.

Because Crashphalt supports Remote Play and is free, that’s the game tutorials have been advising players download, leading to its recent increase in popularity.

“I dunno why they chose Crashphalt,” RetroSpecter wrote. “The only requirement for the hack is that the has Remote Play enabled, and I guess it does help that Crashphalt is free. But I imagine there are tons of games that fit that bill. Crashphalt was just the lucky game chosen for the honor.”

A similar mod is also now available for Undertale’s follow-up Deltarune, which has led to another spike in popularity for Crasphalt because it can be used for that mod too.

Referring to a Steam review that said they wondered how the developer felt that “literally no one cares about their game and only use it to mod other games”, RetroSpecter said they didn’t actually mind, because they have since moved onto other projects and were just happy to see it getting a second life.

“Undertale came out around the same time I was getting into game dev, and was incredibly inspiring to me,” they wrote. “So I think its really cool that it’s found a way to impact the community even if in a small way and act as a way for friends to play the game together.

“So as long as Steam doesn’t take any issue with how Crashphalt is being used, have fun playing and fighting Sans with your friends.”