Sometimes, I’m nostalgic for a feeling, not a specific game.
I’ve learned that about myself while playing UFO 50, a new game from a star-studded lineup of indie developers, including Spleunky’s Derek Yu, Downwell’s Ojiro Fumoto, and more. That massive collection of 50 original 8-bit games (“developed” by a fictional ’80s studio called UFO Soft) offered me a sense of discovery I haven’t felt uncovering new video games in a long time.
One of my favorite games early on in the package is Mortol, a platformer where players must sacrifice themselves to clear obstacles and get through a level. I adored it but assumed it was a one-off in this sea of 50 games. That’s why I was shocked to discover that it had a full-on sequel in the package, one that radically reinvents a formula that I had no idea existed until I stumbled upon it.
As someone who covers video games, not much surprises me about this industry I love anymore. UFO 50 brings that lost energy back. While its retro aesthetic and fictional “lost games” premise are what initially drew me in, it’s the unique kind of nostalgia the package taps into that makes it appealing. As Mossmouth’s Derek Yu tells me in an interview about the upcoming game, that feeling is only possible thanks to a commitment to authenticity that goes beyond simply 8-bit lip service.
An original throwback collection
UFO 50 is a collection of 50 original retro-inspired games. The conceit is that they are all supposed to be from a forgotten game developer, UFO Soft, that released games between 1982 and 1989 on its LX console. That hook is what initially drew me to UFO 50. I’m a sucker for games like Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics as they offer insight into their creation and allow me to experience them chronologically as players did back when they were released
The UFO 50 development team worked to recapture that authentic vibe by creating a believable gaming company and set of 50 connected games. To do so, Spelunky creator Derek Yu tells Digital Trends in an email interview that the developers did a lot of research.
“To get into the mind of UFO Soft, we did study the history of video games in the 80s, not just big companies like Nintendo but also less famous studios that would be more similar to UFO Soft,” Yu says. “We felt it was important to understand the realities of game development during that time period in order to make our work feel authentic.”
That authentic commitment to the 8-bit gaming era is what makes UFO 50 games so entrancing. If you can buy that UFO Soft was ahead of its time in terms of the genres it’s making games for, it’s believable that some of these games could’ve launched in the ’80s. It feels so right because the UFO 50 development team set restrictions to ensure their games felt like they were from that era. Yu says the team had some strict limitations while creating UFO 50’s games, including a 32-color palette that all the games had to work within.
“Having those rules defined early on made it a lot easier to develop a cohesive vibe in all of our 50 games — one that not only felt like the 80s but also felt unique to our fictional console, the LX,” Yu explained. “As development went on, we came up with some other techniques that we applied on a case-by-case basis to give UFO 50 an authentic feel. Things like adding brief black screen buffers between transitions to give a slight impression of loading or limiting the lifespan of sprites and objects on screen.”
All of those elements make UFO 50 an ambitious art piece and game development experiment. If you’re looking for some new retro-inspired games to play or like the format of game collections such as Atari 50, you’ll have a good time with it. The more I played UFO 50, the more I understood that my enjoyment of it was connected to something much deeper and more emotional.
A sense of exploration
I love gaming history and stay informed about video games in development. This helps me excel at my job but occasionally leaves me yearning for an era of gaming when I was more naive and could stumble upon my all-time favorite games by accident. If I had never seen a commercial for Pandemic Studios’ Star Wars: Battlefront II in a pizza place when I was younger, I may have never played what is my favorite game of all time. I was ecstatic when DICE’s reboot of the series was revealed at E3 2013. Now, I can name every Star Wars game announced at this time.
That’s part of getting older and learning more about how the sausage is made in my favorite media industry, but a sense of wonder and exploration has been missing recently for me in gaming. I’ve felt that magic has started to come back, though. Earlier this month, my favorite thing about Astro Bot was discovering new VIP bots, looking them up, and learning more about the games they were based on. Now, UFO 50 is eliciting a similar feeling with not just cameos but full-on games.
“You rarely knew exactly what you were getting into when you booted up a game back then.”
This was very intentional on the developers’ part, according to Yu, who recalled playing a Jaws NES game at a friend’s house and looking at the file names of his parents’ MS-DOS floppy disks without knowing what would appear on the screen when he booted them up.
“Sometimes those fleeting moments leave big memories precisely because they keep the mystery intact,” Yu says. “One of our big goals with UFO 50 is to capture those feelings of exploration, both inside the games as you learn their mechanics and worlds and outside the games in the collection itself.”
Nostalgia for a feeling
Individual series like Mortol and Campanella emerge throughout UFO 50. I found myself becoming a fan of them and being eager to see where those series and UFO Soft would go next. Because these weren’t preexisting games, there was no way to predict what would come next. Yu notes that this sense of discovery also applied to a lot of game design of the 1980s and, in turn, the design of the games in UFO 50.
“The 80s were also an era that we think of fondly because you rarely knew exactly what you were getting into when you booted up a game back then,” Yu says. “Once you started playing, the games would actually let you get a little bit lost, whereas modern game design often involves putting up guard rails and signposts to make sure the player is always moving forward. In a lot of ways, those 80s titles feel more adventurous, and we wanted to draw on that energy.”
Many players — myself included — get into video games because of the vastness of the medium and the sense of adventure each new game offers. Over time, it was only natural I’d experience diminishing returns on that feeling as I recognized long-running series, industry-wide trends, and genre clichés. Nostalgia in the video game industry often focuses on the games themselves, but many of the games I love from my childhood left such an impact because I didn’t know what to expect going in and ended up adoring the experience.
That’s something nearly impossible for a single game that’s part of a popular series in a well-established genre can do today. It took an ambitious indie team to make 50 connected games to remind me of that feeling; for that, I’m grateful. If you want to go through this kind of journey yourself, UFO 50 launches on PC via Steam on September 18.
