I saw a lot of great stuff at Summer Game Fest’s Play Days event this year. Every genre was covered, from third-person action games and third-person shooters, to third-person horror and third-person open-world adventures. Don’t get me wrong, the entire slate of upcoming games where you look over a hero’s shoulder while they swing a sword and/or shoot a gun look phenomenal, but if I ha𓆉d to pick one game th𓆏at moved the needle most for me across the entire weekend, it’d have to be UFO 50, a game that’s actually 50 games, so I’m a little bit cheating. Though I can say with certainty that none of them are third-person.
I was introduced to UFO 50 by two of its developers, Derek Yu and Jon Perry, and I only had ten minutes to play it which, as you can imagine, is not enough time to experience 50 games. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer, but I was sold entirely on Yu and Perry’s pitch. You may think, as 𒁏I did, that they had so many ideas for games that they decided to just make all of them, but that’s not the case. Rather, they first decided to make 50 games, then they🐭 figured out what those games should be.
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I also assumed these must be micro-games, like the ones you’d find in WarioWare or on one of the old flash sites. Again, wrong. These are 50 fully-developed 8bit games, inspired by ‘80s home game consoles. There’s incredible variety here. I played a golfing game, a Metroidvania-style submarine game, a gameꦫ where you bet on the outcome of an alien foot race, and a strategy game about hosting parties. Every retro genre is represented here, exactly half of them have multiplayer, and some of them are so substantial, they probably could have been released as standalone games. Yu and Perry told me one of them is a classic turn-based RPG that could take 60 hours to fully complete.
All of the games are unlocked 🌊right at the start. You just choose a thumbnail that looks interesting from a massive list, and start playing. There could have been some descriptions to help guide people towards the titles they would be the most interested in, but that would defeat the point. Yu and Perry say that they designed UFO 50 to replicate the experience of going over to your friend’s house, browsing through their collection of game cartridges, and popping in one of them. You never knew what you were playing or how to play it. Figuring out the rules of each game is part of the experience. Exploring the library is the entire point.
It’s like ൲a Sega Mega Drive Classic Collection, but for games that don’t exist. The titular UFO is a fictional game studio that published these titles throughout the 80s, and the games are organized in their chronological rele♊ase order. The developers say playing the games in release order will reveal a progression from beginning to end as the games get more complex and sophisticated with the passage of time. You’ll also discover some sequels and recurring characters as you play through them, but they still encourage people to explore the collection in any order they choose.
The devs have been working on UFO 50 for nearly eight years, which is probably the least surprising thing I learned about this game. It’s an incredibly ambitious project for a small indie team to tackle, and I’m astound✅ed at the work that’s gone into making 50 fully realized games. It made me more nostalgic for the bygone era of 8 bit games than any retro-inspired game I’ve played before because of its commitment to replicating not just the way it felt to play those♏ games, but the way it felt to discover them too.
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