You can’t go back to the 1980s. What if I told you it was possible to gently warp your memories of that time? UFO 50 is a card containing 50 games that once existed for an old computer system, all lovingly restored by a gang of coders. The old console is fictional, of course. The LX-I never existed. But it’s a fun pseudo-history to create a bag of little games (some disposable, others mighty), all designed with a distinctly ’80s look. It’s an exercise in sticking to an aesthetic. Like an oil painter working with a limited color palette, the developers of this pack have stuck to the 32-bit equivalent of Zorn’s palette. Play a little of each game, though, and you start to feel the chronos grin. These games aren’t stuck in the past, but rather enjoying a vacation there.
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It's also a hilarious collection of jokes and pranks at the player's expense. In an adventure game, rocks can fall on you without warning seconds after your first moves. In a puzzle game about a chameleon, birds devour you from logs just when you think you've figured out the rules of camouflage. In a medieval strategy game, your troops move steadily and automatically forward, eager to attack and unable to even think about defending. This game is called “Attactics”; the title alone is a good joke.
There's also the comedy (and satisfaction) of discovering exactly what each of these things are. Barbuta, the “oldest” game in the collection, is a humble old-school Metroidvania that harbors problematic secrets and requires the patience and dedication of a child indoors on a rainy day to make progress. Rail Heist looks like a Sunset Riders-style shooter, but then invites you to play it as an Atari-era Hotline Miami before you finally realize, “Wait a minute, this is… an immersive sim!?”
Very few games give you any instructions, choosing instead to throw you into the game. It's a common complaint that modern games are too demanding, overly didactic, and don't trust the player's perseverance or intelligence. So it's refreshing to get 50 games (of varying depth) that implicitly trust the player to “figure it out.” If your patience or intelligence runs out (mine did a few times), you can just pop the cartridge out and play something else.
To cite one of the more intriguing oddities, Mooncat is a comically incomprehensible platformer with some of the most counterintuitive controls you'll encounter this side of 1985. But if you stop and “step away” from your preconceived notions of what a controller's inputs are supposed to do, the idea behind it makes some sense. All the directional buttons move you left, all the face buttons move you right. Hey, why not? These are games that were invented, narratively, forty years ago, and it's fun to read Mooncat as a product of a time long before the genre's control schemes had developed any sense of orthodoxy.
The entire collection exists in this realm of tension, stretched like a 40-year-old rubber band. If you squint, you can recognize modern-day games among the pixels. Zoldath is a randomly generated exploration game set on an alien world where your tools feed on mineral and plant collectors. In other words, it’s No Man’s Sky, but in 1984. Meanwhile, Bug Hunter’s grid-based laser zapping feels like a NES version of Into The Breach (and surprisingly leaves you wanting more as a result). Velgress is a popcorn platformer that frightens you off of rotting platforms and throws you higher. It’s like Downwell, but above. That's right. After all, Downwell's designer is on the team of the (real) developers who made the collection.
“Our goal,” the gang says, “is to combine a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design.” I'd say they've succeeded. Many of the games rely on design principles or new tricks that wouldn't have found their way into the shooters and platformers of old, and it's interesting to see where the creators draw the line between what constitutes modern and what constitutes “classic” game design. (They're also unintentionally compiling games that fit the aesthetic of the “indie darlings” era of the 2010s, but that's probably because, well, There is (o my dears).
The modern twists are notable. Take the concept of “lives,” for example. Mortal is a platformer where you’re given a generous 20 lives. But you’re then expected to spend those lives turning yourself into blocks of stone, or repeatedly throwing yourself against walls to create a stepping stone out of your solid corpse, helping your next “life” advance further into the level. Other modern ideas have seeped into the games. You can hold down a button to skip long cinematics, for example. And at least one game adapts the contemporary practice of mobile gaming, ranking you on a three-star scale at the end of each level.
Against the aesthetics of a pixelated era, these features feel alien, yet strangely compelling. Imagine Humphrey Bogart sending a telegram in a 1950s film noir, and then the text starts popping up on the screen in a WhatsApp conversation bubble. Imagine enjoying an Akira Kurosawa film and suddenly: there’s a clearly recognisable drone shot. This is what playing UFO 50 is like. A compilation of double takes, a hilarious provocation of “aha”s, a bonanza of anachronisms.
It works well, mostly because it’s so tied to the framing narrative: this collection exists as a restoration project. If you look closely, there’s a meta-story (or perhaps a “meta-history”) to be unraveled. Each game has its own short developer note. And there’s a terminal for entering cheat codes that I suspect will reveal some fun secrets (I couldn’t figure out a single one). Taken all at once, the compilation is the story of a hobby’s slow professionalization. Even each game’s menu screens, when taken in chronological order and analyzed individually like polar ice caps, track the changes of its creative pioneers.
The early games are credited in plain text as having been made by a trio called “Petter, Chun & Smolski.” In later games, the personal names are replaced by a company, “LX Systems,” and then “UFO Soft.” Eventually, the games start to have a professionally animated logo, complete with a nice jingle. All personal business cards are toned down. The mysterious figure of a developer named Thorson Petter appears in early works, often the creator of games that are painful or confusing to play, but are strangely sincere in their own user-agnostic way (guess who made Barbuta and Mooncat). Later, his name seems to disappear.
Of course, you don’t have to join any of these. You can find 25 games that include local multiplayer and go wild with a friend. There’s also a built-in curation feature that lets you filter games by genre. “Quick play” and “Reflex play” cover some arcade games, while “Thought-provoking games” offers all the puzzles. And even within those filters is a little surprise, a special screen for collectors and enthusiasts. Perhaps it’s time to mention that if you subscribe to Retro Gamer and find yourself watching endless YouTube documentaries about the good old days of pixel platforming, this will undoubtedly tickle your fancy. It also feels like it was made specifically for game design students. UFO 50 is going to pop up in a Mark Brown video at any moment and people are going to wonder why they haven’t heard of it (it’s because you don’t read RPS, ignorant people!). Ahem.
If you’re not that kind of person — if you’re not a retro geek or a game designer — then it’s a harder sell. There are games that are deceptively deep, that are engaging enough to grab you by the “one more round” glands. But you have to go in knowing that part of the fun is sifting through the piles to find them. I’d slog through three or four games of rage football or samurai tennis with lazy channel-surfing curiosity, only to get lost for an hour like Batman in a nerdy dino-worshipping worker placement game (it’s called Avianos, it’s great). That’s part of the trick. UFO 50 isn’t just about playing a bunch of small, tightly made games, it’s about chasing the thrill of discovering something that stands out.
As someone who spent years curating games for an audience, I’m conflicted about this. It feels like a bit of a chore. I used to hunt down the free games section of this site every week on itch.io. Even in today’s overwhelming gaming apocalypse, I understand the satisfaction and disinterest that comes with digging for gold dust. It’s certainly satisfying to dig through UFO 50 and find an Avianos, a Velgress, a Mortal in the pile. But I didn’t finish all 50 games in the collection. I barely scratched half of them. I don’t think I’d dare to pull out the entire package. (Fun side note: This isn’t the first time we’ve been in the coal mine with 50 short games or 300 games on a pirate card).
Perhaps an unfinished pile is to be expected. The internet is a talented eater, and I look forward to reading user reviews of UFO 50 in a way I haven’t for many other new releases. Players will be able to announce their favorites, list their must-haves, and engage in role-playing flame wars over which game in the Campanella Trilogy is the best. Maybe someone will explain why you shouldn’t give up on Thorson Petter’s obscure work. That would be great. I don’t want to complete that confusing platformer Mooncat, but I do want to watch a 20-minute retrospective of the bearded 50-year-old who did it.