We need to talk about Deltarune's Egg Man
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the walrus.
Please note: this was published on 14th May, 2025, and will be outdated when new chapters of Deltarune release. Oh, and also, UT/DR spoilers ahead.
Well, there is a blog post here.
Deltarune’s Egg Man has always frustrated me a bit. Not so much the character itself, moreso the culture that swirls around him. It perfectly exemplifies something I like to call the commodification of lore — when information is only interesting or useful to fans insofar as it contributes to a sprawling bigger picture of backstory, world building, or simply potential future narrative threads.
If you’ve heard the expression “missing the forest for the trees”, it’s sort of like “missing the trees for the forest”. Apt for a man who hides behind a tree, I suppose. We get lost in connecting what we believe are puzzle pieces, rather than appreciating them as completed puzzles in their own right.
So, I’d like to talk about the Egg Man today — what purpose he serves, and why I think it’s counter-intuitive to approach his presentation from the lore side of things.
But it’s always worth pointing out that I can’t divine the future, much as I’d like to. Maybe the Egg Man does have a serious role to play in Deltarune’s story going forward. It’s hard to feel comfortable ruling out possibilities two sevenths of the way through a story — so you can make your own conclusions on that front. Just hear me out first.
The Basics
Real quick, I’d just like to lay out the very basics of the Egg Man for anyone out of the loop. It seems inconceivable once you’ve been talking Deltarune theories for long enough, but yes, many people would miss him in their playthroughs. I didn’t even know he existed until I came back to Deltarune this year.
In both chapter one and chapter two, when walking between two select screens (between the Starwalker bird room & the dark tree area in chapter one, and between the dumpster room at the bottom of the car puzzle & the hallway next to it in chapter two) there is a small chance Kris on their own — without party members — is taken to an empty room with a tree in the middle.
Interacting with the tree lets us know there is a man behind it, who will hand Kris an egg and then disappear. The egg is added to your inventory, and it can then be placed in various locations in the light world. That’s the gist — more on the specifics a bit later.
Eggs
So, before we talk about the Egg Man, let’s talk about eggs, man. It should be kept in mind that Toby Fox just finds eggs funny. That’s not to say that the Egg Man’s eggs are meaningless — but there is nothing special about eggs in and of themselves in Deltarune. Here’s a few examples to jog your memory.
That’s Lancer playing on the phrase “last one there is a rotten egg”. He also goes on to say “You won’t get through your teen years without at least one Egg” — a reference to Earthbound.
Perhaps just a one-off? Well, I’m sure you’ll remember this one:
Yep, an entire scene of egg puns, culminating in a particularly fan-favorite line from Asgore.
Still doesn’t move the dial for you? What about Pipis?
On a handful of occasions, including a tweet from Toby Fox, Pipis are referred to as eggs.
Look, I could keep going — we could talk about Asgore painting Yoshi eggs for Asriel, all the references to eggnog, Temmie’s egg (which is, in itself, a reference to Undertale), etc — but I’m sure you get the picture. Eggs are not notable in and of themselves in Deltarune. So, let’s get to the heart of it.
The Egg Man
Here’s an uncontroversial statement for you: the Egg Man’s eggs are easter eggs. Regardless of your interpretation of the Egg Man, I trust that we can all agree on this. In media, an easter egg is simply something hidden for the audience to find. Oftentimes a joke or reference, but not inherently. Through his hard to find nature, his presence in Deltarune is an easter egg.
But it goes a step further than that — Deltarune’s Egg Man is a deconstruction of the entire concept of easter eggs.
Ever wondered where the phrase “easter egg” came from?
While it isn’t the first example of a videogame easter egg, Adventure (1980) is considered to be the origin point. The story goes that, frustrated with Atari’s policy of not crediting its staff, designer Warren Robinett decided to leave his name in a hidden room. It’s accessed by carrying three different items to a specific screen and dropping them off one by one, allowing the player to walk through a wall and reach the message. Atari realized that these sorts of secrets gave players an extra incentive to play the games, likening them to a literal easter egg hunt. It became company policy to hide these “easter eggs” in every game going forward, and the rest is history.
But... wait a second. Let’s describe that process again — a secret in a videogame which asks the player to walk to and from a seemingly arbitrary spot, eventually allowing them to access a secret room with a fun — but functionally meaningless for the player — secret. Sounds like the Egg Man, right?
Deltarune’s Egg Man isn’t just an easter egg — it’s intentionally invoking one of the most iconic easter eggs of all time, from Adventure. And in the process, it attempts to deconstruct the entire idea of the videogame easter egg.
Look at it from a bird’s eye view: here’s the Egg Man, in his entirety, so far:
Walk back and forth for a while.
Receive a reward in the form of a useless item.
Exchange the item for some minor dialogue in the light world.
A counter ticks up, tracking how many eggs you’ve found.
Doesn’t that sound like... well, most videogame quests and easter eggs? Do some busywork, whether that’s walking somewhere or completing an arbitrary task like killing a certain number of enemies or solving a puzzle, and receive an irrelevant item or a few lines of unique — but unimpactful — dialogue.
I’ve been playing Alan Wake recently, and this accurately describes that game’s easter eggs to a T. Walk to an area you’re not directly pointed to, receive a collectible or some dialogue (via a short TV program or snippets of a radio show). By nature these things can’t heavily impact the game’s narrative or gameplay because they’re purposefully hidden, left with the understanding that only a small number of players will find them.
When checking the egg, you get this dialogue:
The most common interpretation of this line in the community is a literal one — not too important (won’t majorly affect the game), not too unimportant (still has an impact). But I think it makes a lot more sense to read it as an extension of this deconstruction of the videogame easter egg — not too important (functionally useless), not too unimportant (still technically provides a reward). It’s very tongue in cheek, but it makes perfect sense in Toby Fox’s style of writing.
What makes the most sense to me about this interpretation is that it’s perfectly in-line with Toby Fox’s design approach. Undertale is all about deconstructing videogame tropes — it’s kind of the core conceit of the game. Violence in RPGs is a given, so what happens if we deconstruct that premise? On a smaller scale, with a smaller idea, the same thing is happening here.
The best part is, Toby Fox objectively succeeds in how he presents this deconstruction. As mentioned earlier, the “easter egg” idea caught on at Atari because they thought it would lead players to spend more time with their game, to hunt for secrets. And in Deltarune, players are falling over themselves to hunt for the eggs, convinced of their future potential, building elaborate theories around them. Even when stripped down to its base essentials, the easter egg is still enough to compel players to go on the hunt.
But Gaster? The Sweepstakes??
When I’ve shared this interpretation with people — in a much less wordy capacity, don’t worry — the common sentiment is that it makes sense, but the details don’t add up. What about the Gaster parallels? What about the references in the new Sweepstakes pages? Well, let’s dig into that.
Over in the Deltarune Discord server, user qwerty put together a handy list of reasons why Gaster and the Egg Man appear to be connected. It’s the most succinct roundup of the evidence that I’ve seen, so let’s go through it one-by-one.
Starting with number one, the Egg Man and Gaster are both referred to as “a man”. We should first understand why Gaster is referred to that way — I think there are two main reasons.
First of all, it’s a reference to the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible. As I’m sure you’re aware, Gaster is closely linked to the number six. Revelation 13:18 says:
“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”
“The number of a man”, or “the man’s number”, depending on how it’s translated. With Gaster’s connection to the number — and this being the origin point for the pop culture reputation of the number 666 — it feels fairly obvious.
On the other hand, one of Gaster’s appearances in Undertale is as the “Mystery Man”. This, in turn, is a reference to the character of the same name in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. These references solidify our understanding of Gaster as a character.
The Egg Man is a lot more nebulous. Dialogue in-game only ever refers to him as “a man”.
It’s vague, and unspecific. I think this in turn reinforces his role in the deconstruction of the easter egg; at every turn, each step of the process has been broken down to its bare essentials. The process is simply walking back and forth, the person giving the reward is unidentified, the reward itself is a literal egg. He’s “a man” simply because his identity is irrelevant, not because he’s hidden.
Back to qwerty’s post, and second of all we have the visual parallel to Undertale’s Mystery Man fun event. In both instances, the room appears between two screens, there is a similar empty space with the focal point in the middle, and they both disappear following their interaction. There is no denying that this is an intentional, direct parallel — Fox is invoking that moment here in Deltarune. But that doesn’t have to imply a connection between the two characters. It must be kept in mind that Deltarune acts in-part as a response to the success of Undertale. It follows up on ideas from that game, both thematically and literally. Think of Spamton NEO for example, a boss fight which was borne from fans’ outcry over the lack of a true Mettaton NEO fight. When deconstructing easter eggs, why wouldn’t Fox aim to invoke his most famous and enduring easter egg? Keep the Gaster frenzy of Undertale’s heyday in mind here — if you were online in those spaces in 2015/2016 (and, indeed, onward), you knew about Gaster, and you especially knew about the Mystery Man encounter.
In a game that places a great emphasis on Gaster, it’s understandably suspicious that Fox might invoke him somewhere he isn’t directly involved — but contextually it makes sense to build that parallel in a scene which revolves around the idea of the videogame easter egg.
Finally, to cover qwerty’s final two points, neither of these feel especially strong to me. We already covered the way eggs are referenced all over Deltarune, regularly divorced from the context of the Egg Man. In this case, “egg” is included as an option alongside things like grains, meat, dairy, etc. It seems likely these were part of a scrapped version of the Gonermaker food question.
As for the code skip, I’m not a programmer — so I decided to speak to some programmers. Of the people I spoke to, opinions were mixed, and generally inconclusive. According to those who looked at the code, it seemingly was an intentional choice to skip to the number 600. But there are lots of reasons why this might’ve been the case, including simply for organization. Fox has admitted that his code is messy, after all. I’ve also been unable to find any instance of Gaster being associated with the number 600 elsewhere in Undertale or Deltarune. 6, 66, and 666 are all solid signs of Gaster shenanigans, but never 600. So, the jury is still out on this one — but I’m inclined to believe it’s unrelated.
Overall, it’s easy to see the connection — and I couldn’t blame anyone for thinking these smaller details add up to an undeniably Gaster-y picture. But when digging into them individually, I think the picture starts to fall apart.
And, ordinarily, that would be the end of it... Until the 9th of May, when the Spamton Sweepstakes was updated ahead of the new chapters’ release. Amongst the new pages were a couple of direct references to the Egg Man.
thepoorchildren features the Egg Man’s tree, while windows features a stained glass window with an egg-shaped oval, signifying the correct link to the next page.
For many, these new pages suggest a heftier level of importance for the Egg Man — why feature his imagery here, now, if not?
Well, I think it’s important that we keep the context of the Sweepstakes in mind — these new pages do not divorce themselves from that original concept. As part of the ‘90s internet theme, the rabbit hole of links we follow is a reference to the web art installation Superbad — a similar rabbit hole of strange, mostly unrelated pieces of art which you discover by clicking branching paths of links on each page. In that sense, I think it’s important that we don’t put too much emphasis on certain pages linking to certain places in the Sweepstakes — there is rarely a direct connection.
The Sweepstakes is, as a whole, a loosely connected jumble of hints, jokes and out of context sprites. Some of it is elaborate (like rarecats), while other parts are purely for the bit (like lancer). Many pages, like weather or shadowmen, are pretty straight forward — if inconsequential — teasers for the next chapters. I think that last one applies to the Egg Man pages, too; he will likely appear again in the next two chapters. The sprite on the windows page may be a hint to his location in chapter four — an oval is flipped around to resemble an egg, not too dissimilar to chapter two’s tree grafitti. The tree on thepoorchildren acts as a general pointer of something to look out for. As mentioned at the beginning, it must be kept in mind that the Egg Man is not common knowledge to all Deltarune fans — Toby Fox hinting at a reasonably obscure easter egg does not need an ulterior motive, it only appears suspicious to those of us deep into the theorycrafting side of things.
To sum things up, I’d like to go back to what I called “the commodification of lore” earlier. When I think about the Egg Man, and the way it explores the idea of the videogame easter egg — tracing it back to its roots, breaking it down to its bare essentials — I’m deeply impressed by Toby Fox as a designer. It so perfectly encapsulates that original idea at Atari, incentivising players to look closer and explore all possibilities. In a way, the Egg Man is our companion, our reminder to search Deltarune for the little details. There are always things hidden under the surface. And if that has inspired people to dig deeper, to try to understand the strange web of evidence Fox presents to his audience, I would call it a success. Yes, even without a lore drop attached.