UFO 50 review – a galaxy of 80s games brought brilliantly back to the future
When he was a schoolboy, Derek Yu, one of the first indie game superstars of the 2000s, designed games on graph paper with his friend Jon Perry. After Yu’s first major game, Spelunky, became a hit, he and Perry agreed to collaborate again, no longer as classmates but as men in their 40s. This sweet backstory infuses UFO 50, a dizzyingly ambitious collection of 50 games that, so the narrative framing goes, were created by a fictional games company during the eight-year period from 1982 to 1989. Each game has the aesthetic of an Atari 2600 or NES classic – chunky sprites, a warbling chiptune soundtrack – but uses current design trends and understanding to inject old-looking games with modern freshness.
Why 50? Who knows. But it’s a sufficiently high number that Yu and Perry (and some supportive developer friends) have been able to flex their design talent across an electrifying range of genres, some of which are familiar, others of which are entirely new. For example, in Party House, we must attempt to throw the best house party by achieving the perfect balance of guests, from vivacious but troublemaking rock stars, to pettable dogs, to comedians who bring the laughter at a financial cost. You’re scored on the quality of the evening you arrange, with penalties if the neighbours complain or the fire department decides your party has become hazardously peopled. Others attempt to perfect games of the era: Night Manor is a point-and-click horror story in which you’re pursued through a mansion; Bushido Ball an Edo-era themed version of Pong; Rail Heist a kinetic stealth-action game in which you play as an outlaw and his horse staging a series of train heists.
For Yu and Perry, it’s been a preposterously ambitious undertaking, multiplying the challenges and timings involved in crafting a single video game by a factor of 50. For us, the result is a gift of wild generosity, a demonstration of how much untapped creative terrain remains in even the crudest-looking video games.