Videogames have long suffered the indignity of a lack of preservation. Only recently have games internally shown self-awareness for the industry issue. By necessity, a stronger genre of retro collections with self-contained game development histories have emerged as a result. Games like the Digital Eclipse developed Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration (2022) are at the vanguard of the movement: combining a series of classic videogames with storytelling about their creation. UFO 50, itself the storied product of eight years of development by six game developers, is a fictional compilation of 50 classic videogames created by a mythical game studio spanning all manner of length, genre, and design philosophy.
Over the course of the 50 games, UFO 50 creates a framing of industry progression. There is design continuity as you work down the list of games, all accessible from the jump, and experience the linear iteration of design ideas, technology, and expanding mechanics.
While all 50 games have an impetus of retro design, the holistic design is modern. The games are created with Quality of Life features and input fluidity that is not necessarily era-faithful. The vibe and charm of retro videogames, though, is the point, and where the game hits home. Imagine a Game Jam, where developers produce slices of speculative videogames over short periods, wherein the theme is Classic Nintendo Games and each project is then allotted a budget and proper development time to see the concept through to the end. UFO 50 feels like an omnibus of a dreamed up Game Jam that allowed the full possibility of game development.
Many of the games feel feature complete, several are actually fantastic standalone games, and the variety is so lush that everyone will find something of value. There are platformers, full-fledged RPGs, shmups, racing, and strategy games. There are a slew of articles and videos out there ranking and reviewing every game. That’s the wrong approach and a misunderstanding of what UFO 50 is and what it does.
The game is the collective compilation. There are, sure, full games in here. Hell, there’s a grindy Western-themed RPG called Grimstone. You could spend a whole 20 hours there alone. But taking any part of the experience away from the other parts misses what the game is really doing.
What UFO 50 is really doing is creating a meta portrait of iterative game development, commentary on game development and design progression itself. The mixture of arcade reflex challenges and thoughtful strategic gameplay is a balance that is meant to be considered holistically.
You’re not intended to play all 50 games. The multipack game design, though, insists that you find your series of favorites and sink your time into those. You are the authoring the story of your own manufactured nostalgia for a company and consoles and games that only exist in the meta fiction.
Some of the games are speculative slices that set up other games. The best way to trial all the games is to move through their in-fiction chronology, and track how iterative design develops across the 50-game series. It’s a treat, full of mechanics both rudimentary and complex.
Not every game is good. But in the games you do not love, in their hard edges, you find the willful experimentation from a bygone era wherein the rental shop was once filled with iterative mechanical expressions and innovative new ideas about what games could be. This traces us back to the formative building blocks of genre and understanding, at a systemic level, what games could become, in their early bite-sized, 8-bit formative molds.
Developer Mossmouth have, by producing an omnibus of 50 mostly distinct experiences, created something singular. The singularity comes down to the paralysis of these options, that you have excellent 4X games but can also slide into a simple puzzle the next moment, but the grand gesture of it all, by not making the selection micro-games, but full-fledged mechanical experiments, some short and some long, some hard and some easy, some deeply involved and some casual, you can span the whole course of early game development and from your taste test, can attach personal meaning and value, maybe even nostalgia, to something wherein all of this must be designed and created from the ground up.
UFO 50 is an excellent videogame wherein even its rough edges are additive to the overall story of a fictional game developer. Experientially, every player will craft their own narrative of their experience with these speculative retro games and as an entire package, it begins to feel as though we’ve moved beyond simple formulaic replications of past game designs and into a deeper phase of indie development, commenting on and understanding our relationship to the history of videogames and what it means to preserve them.
Reviewed on Steam Deck