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Mr. Ant Tenna’s character was conceptualized around 2016 as a “TV character who [would] be like Mettaton.” Toby Fox composed the main theme of a TV World as early as 2015. Ghost Trick’s lineless 3D models inspired Toby Fox to try his own lineless models of Tenna and to buy a Kinect to rotoscope Tenna’s movements to dances from the MikuMikuDance animation program. On October 1, 2016, Toby Fox uploaded a 3D animated Kinect GIF onto his Twitter/X, an early attempt at achieving Tenna’s 3D design.

Other inspirations came from TV Dinnah from Little King’s Story, a CRT-headed boss and ruler of Primetime Kingdom, and P.T. Bridgeport, a traveling circus manager and bear, from the comic Pogo, who inspired the use of word art in Tenna’s dialogue.

The inspirations behind the general gameplay of Chapter 3 included The Legend of Zelda, Mario Party, Black’s Base from Gunstar Heroes, and Super Mario Bros. 3. Prior to 2017, Tenna’s name was “Mr. TV Guy.”

Tenna was first officially and directly mentioned in the Spamton Sweepstakes’ page deltarune.com/d_a_m_n_y_o_u_t_e_n_n_a. Prior to his namedrop, the TV in the Dreemurr’s living room was often confused as “Mike” by the Chapter 2 era fandom. Tenna was indirectly referenced multiple times during the Spamton Sweepstakes’ livestream, the Spamton Value Network, and referred to by Spamton as “[Cathode]” in his Q&A. He also appeared in the Sweepstakes’ page https://deltarune.com/tv/ in his Light World form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61zGGtTdv5s (15:01)

Images of The Green Room, Shadowguys, Elnina and Lanino, and other Tenna-related pages were also released during the Spamton Sweepstakes, but no other mention or image of Tenna appeared. The UTDR Summer Newsletter dropped June 25th 2023, discussing the progress of the final overworld and including a small graphic of a Toby Fox-operated steamroller and CRT. The chapter was self-described as having “unusual gameplay” and as being “not too heavy on the story.”

https://toby.fangamer.com/newsletters/summer23/ (add steamroller dog image)

Deltarune Chapter 3 received another small status update via newsletter on September 9th, 2023, revealing a scrapped sneak mechanic.

October 11th, 2023, a friend of Toby Fox’s played through the entire chapter. Deltarune Chapter 3 was announced as “pretty much content complete” in the Halloween Newsletter, with Japanese localization, porting, and bugtesting still in progress.

An image of Chapter 3’s Dark World was shared for the first time on September 13th, 2024.

https://toby.fangamer.com/newsletters/autumn24/

On April 2nd, 2025, the pre-order trailer for DELTARUNE Chapters 3-4 played during the Nintendo Direct, along with a snippet of Tenna’s first more Dark World-looking appearance. On the same day, Tenna’s design was leaked through Gonintendo pages with users sharing an image of one of Chapter 3’s game borders.

Check the example page