UFO 50, and the joy of discovery
A game that recaptured an era from my past... but not the one you'd think
I felt like I had to write something about this game. It’s possibly my favorite game of the 2020s. It’s also impossible to truly convey why I like it. Let me try anyway.
First off: if you’re not familiar with UFO 50, it’s a compilation of fifty retro games from the 1980s that you’ve never heard of, because they didn’t exist. Properly playing UFO 50 involves joining the developers in the playspace of an alternate timeline, imagining the history of fictional game company UFO Soft along with them.
And digging through 80s games is nostalgic for me! But not in the way you might guess.
Unexpected nostalgia
In 2015- nearly a decade ago- my fiancée Hope and I had just started dating. One of the first things we bonded over was digging through 80s NES games. They were all in a poorly-sorted, poorly-labeled folder on a Wii NES emulator, and we'd just open a random one and see what it was. Many of the games didn’t work, or were untranslated from Japanese. Some of them were baffling. Others ended up being favorites that I still think about to this day.
And it wasn’t just that some games were unexpectedly fun. It was that we didn’t know what we were getting into until we were already in it. Sometimes it’d be exactly what was on the tin- “Hatris” ended up being Tetris with hats; “Color a Dinosaur” sure was just a coloring game with pictures of dinosaurs. Then you’d boot up “Taboo”, thinking maybe it was a horror survival game, or a risqué third-party product, and find… a tarot card reading simulator? You’d boot up something with a completely unintelligible filename, and it’d be several minutes before you realize this was an official McDonalds tie-in game?
It’s a great era to dig into for this sort of experience, because a lot of modern gaming’s conventions just hadn’t been locked in yet. It’s like reading books with no familiar grammar. Some authors set their own grammatical rules; others just winged it every paragraph. It’s the wild west, baby.
Here’s one: Blaster Master had enemies that dropped a little orb with an H on it, but collecting the H didn’t seem to do anything. Hope and I were stumped. H? …H??? Hours later, we found a powerup that gave us “Hover”, and immediately- in unison- we shouted “H”! H was fuel for hovering. Now we knew!!!
There were lots of fun surprises and games that I'd never have actively hunted out myself, but I ended up loving. That’s the key- we never knew what we were getting into. No expectations beyond maybe a garbled title, like “BlstMstr v1.0”. There were manuals for these games, but we didn’t have them. (It’s likely that a decent-quality PDF scan of the manual would be several thousand times larger than the game’s filesize itself.)
So when we booted up UFO 50, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia… for 2015.
Okay so… how’s the game, though
I’m a hundred hours into it and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my fill yet. There’s so much to love here. Even the stuff I don’t personally click with (I’m not a big Lunar Lander guy, sorry Campanella) is charming, original, and jam-packed with great art and music. And “the stuff I don’t click with” is hugely in the minority.
When I say 50 games, I don’t mean “five real games hidden amongst forty-five half-assed prototypes.” These games are smaller than modern games by a wide margin, but any one of them would have felt appropriate as a mid-80s NES release. And some are honestly huge, like 5-10 hour adventures. There’s several RPGs. One was a full dungeon crawler with a bespoke DIY magic system! You can learn spells just by trying out magical patterns to see what they do! That’s so cool!!!
Hope and I dug into UFO 50 the old fashioned way: drawing maps on paper, writing down sigils. Solving mysteries together, cracking codes. “What’s this pattern mean? Write it down and we’ll keep it in mind for later.” It’s my favorite way to play a game together. Most games weren’t mystery-heavy, but it was fun keeping an eye out for secrets the whole time, even when none were present.
I could list all my favorites, and try to explain why I liked them. But I think that’s largely antithetical to my point here. Maybe that’s a separate article for another day.
The joy of discovery
I don’t think I can properly SHOW someone what I love about UFO 50. I’ve tried! A friend recently asked me to show him some faves, and I tried. I loaded up my well-trodden save file, with the dust already pre-blown off every cartridge. I booted up Party House, I booted up Valbrace. I tried to share some mechanics that had blown me away, some secrets that had made my mind race. It didn’t quite land right; my friend agreed the games were interesting, but he wasn’t nearly as grabbed as I was, from this perspective.
Something had been lost. The joy of discovery.
Somehow, with every game already pre-explored, the collection felt smaller to me. Dusting them off was half the fun. How can I share that without just handing someone the controller, a fresh save file, and- with no preconceptions- letting them play for themselves?
Ah, I get it
And I see people rushing past the discovery phase. Not just with UFO 50, not just with games- everywhere, all the time! “Okay, tell me what this is. Why should I care? Tell me in advance.” I’m guilty of it- when there’s a movie I’m unlikely to watch, I’ll happily skim the plot synopsis, glance at the IMDB average score, and say:
“Ah, I get it.”
No I don’t! No I don’t! How could I? I might get the gist, a gist, but I’m robbing myself of the true intended experience. It’s gone now. I killed it by rushing ahead. Do I really think one sentence in a Wikipedia plot synopsis is a fair picture of a thirty-minute suspense buildup? There’s no way for me to have that experience now. The element of discovery is gone. My favorite spice is lost.
We’re all busy, so of course we want recommendations; we want to skip the chaff, we want to spend our time on the best of the best. To an extent, that’s reasonable, smart. We know what we like, why waste time on things that aren’t that? But most of my favorite media hit me out of nowhere. Maybe I saw a really interesting screenshot, or a friend told me “just watch this, trust me", and that was enough.
I enjoy the mystery, the puzzle box. I want to hunt.
Stray thoughts
I’ve got lots more opinions on this era of game, and what UFO 50 says about it, directly and indirectly.
How UFO 50 is a celebration of the weird, the forgotten, the art that wasn’t mainstream enough.
How most modern game companies only want to acknowledge the shiniest games from their past, and quietly shuffle everything else under the rug, with no way to legally play them.
How archiving old media is important, and how (weirdly, bizarrely) piracy is one of the best ways to ensure archival: in the fiction of UFO 50, the game is only available today because the folks at Mossmouth found its cartridge in a storage closet.
I’ve also got lots more opinions and feelings on UFO 50, but I can’t talk about them without getting more specific about where the game shined brightest for me- which is, again, antithetical to this whole piece. So I’ll put it this way:
If you’ve ever joyously dug through a pile of old roms,
or tried Flash games on Kongregate just based on what had a cool thumbnail,
or searched on Itch.io for weird game jam entries,
or just want to play lots of short games instead of one long one…
… Then yeah, this is worth your time.