A blast from the future?

UFO 50 is the best retro-gaming homage I’ve ever played

Collection of 50 new ’80s-era game concepts brims with originality, care, and joy.

Kyle Orland – Sep 16, 2024 1:30 pm | 55

Just some of the inventive character designs included in UFO 50. Credit: Mossmouth

If you’ve spent any time with retro gaming emulators, you’re likely familiar with the joy of browsing through a long list of (legally obtained) ROMs and feeling overwhelmed at a wide range of titles you’ve never even heard of. Picking randomly through such a game list is like wandering through a foreign country, searching for hidden jewels among all the shovelware in the bewildering and wildly imaginative early video game history.

UFO 50 captures that feeling perfectly, combining the freewheeling inventiveness of old-school game design with modern refinements and more consistent baseline quality bred over the ensuing decades. The result is an extremely playable love letter to the gaming history that will charm even the most jaded retro game fan.

A loving homage

UFO 50 presents itself as a collection of 50 dusty game cartridges made by UFO Soft, a fictional developer that operated from 1982 to 1989. Working through the company’s catalog, you’ll see evolution in graphics, music, and gameplay design that mirror the ever-changing gaming market of the real-world ’80s. You’ll also see the same characters, motifs, and credited “developers” appearing over and over again, building a convincing world behind the games themselves.

The individual games in UFO 50 definitely wear their influences on their sleeves, with countless, almost overt homages to specific ’80s arcade and console games. But there isn’t a single title here that I’d consider a simple clone or knock-off of an old gaming concept; each sub-game brings its own twist or novel idea that makes it feel new.

Bubble Bobble homage Kick Club, for instance, replaces its inspiration’s bubble-blowing dinosaurs with a soccer player that has to constantly chase down his only weapon: a soccer ball. Vainger combines Metroid-style shooting and gated, maze-like exploration with the gravity-flipping of Metal Storm. Magic Garden combines the avoid-your-own-tail gameplay of Snake with items that let you eat up obstacles, Pac-Man-style.

Anyone who remembers playing games in the ’80s will instantly clock plenty of other clear references. A small sampling of ones I noticed includes: Bad Dudes, Blaster Master, Gradius, River City Ransom, Shadowgate, Super Dodge Ball, Smash TV, Space Harrier, and Super Sprint. And, just like any list of ’80s ROMs, you’ll also encounter plenty of grid-based puzzle games and shoot-em-ups, each with their own take on the popular genres.

But other UFO 50 offerings are retro-stylized versions of genres and games that didn’t really exist in the ’80s. If you ever wondered what a caveman-themed tower defense game would look like on the NES, Rock On! Island has the answer. Or if you want to see a positional arena fighter in the style of Super Smash Bros. (complete with original characters that sport their own moves and weapons) then Hyper Contender has you covered. Then there’s Velgress, which combines the retro run-and-gun platforming of the NES with the roguelike procedural generation of a modern classic like Downwell.

Still, other UFO 50 games squeeze completely original concepts (as far as I can tell) into the limited technology of the time period. Lords of Diskonia is a tactical battler that has you flinging units represented by Crokinole-style disks at the other side. Party House asks you to manage a Rolodex of party guests to maximize your money and popularity without attracting unwelcome attention from the cops. Waldorf’s Journey involves flinging the titular walrus on lengthy blind jumps while carefully adjusting his landing with hilarious, energy-consuming flaps of his flippers.

The sheer variety of different gameplay ideas on offer here is incredible. There are real-time strategy games and cooperative two-player brawlers. There’s a full-fledged golf RPG and also a 2D golf game with pinball-style hazards. There’s a Dave the Diver-esque undersea exploration adventure and a couple of Final Fantasy–style RPGs. There’s a game that combines Crazy Taxi and the original, overhead Grand Theft Auto. There’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles homage that combines five different genres with five unique, fully realized anthropomorphic human-animal hybrids.

Attention to detail

It’s hard to stop myself from just tediously describing all 50 unique titles here and summing up by saying, “They’re all great.” But each title in UFO 50 boasts exquisite attention to detail, from excellent character design and pixel art to catchy chiptune earworms. Even if you don’t appreciate every single genre or design idea, you will appreciate the craft and care that went into creating 50 distinct miniature worlds.

Unlike many other “retro-inspired” games, UFO 50 remains incredibly faithful to the technical limitations of the time period, too. The resolution, 32-color palette, and sound design are all strictly limited to the kinds of things that would have been possible in the 1980s, lending the whole thing an authenticity that any old-school gamer should appreciate.

That authenticity extends to the endearing weirdness that was often inherent to ’80s games. UFO 50 includes plenty of “X-treme!” character designs and the kind of intentionally cheesy, faux-badly-translated writing that characterized the youth-focused games of the era. I particularly liked how Kick Club‘s “USA World” featured a stereotypical mix of walking football helmets, floating baseballs, and bouncing basketballs.

And despite its wide range of ideas, UFO 50 isn’t just a collection of mini-game concepts. Each of the 50 titles here could reasonably pass as a classic cartridge on its own, with enough content to keep a player busy for a while. That includes a few full-fledged RPGs and adventure games that will take hours to work through. But it also includes games arcade-style score-chasers with nearly endless replay value and “Nintendo-hard” action games that require hours of practice to perfect a successful 10-minute run.

UFO 50 also captures the sheer bewilderment of figuring out a classic game without a manual or in-game tutorial. While the more action-oriented games are usually easy to play, some of the strategy titles force you to guess your way through confusing controls or decipher limited on-screen information until you find out what the heck is going on.

It’s a refreshing throwback to a time when every new title was an exciting new puzzle to decipher in and of itself, without the solicitous hand-holding that’s common to modern games. UFO 50‘s games are also packed with the kinds of hidden secrets and techniques that would have been the talk of the schoolyard decades ago (there’s an entire “Terminal” section in the menu with a RAM hex-editor that I have yet to decipher).

The best retro console that never existed. Credit: Mossmouth

I’m sure there will be walkthroughs and guides that demystify many of these things in the coming days and weeks, but I’d urge players to avoid them as much as possible. Going into UFO 50 blind is like exploring a lost tomb of long-forgotten but expertly designed technology, joyfully poking around for treasures that can take some work to truly appreciate and understand. What a joy to get to experience an entirely new retro console for the first time, decades after such a thing was really possible.

Listing image: Mossmouth

Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

55 Comments

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lurknomore

Which button emulates blowing into the cartridge connector ?

September 16, 2024 at 5:53 pm

marsilies

So while it's impressive they packed 50 games into it, it did end up taking them 8 years to do so. The title was originally announced in 2017:
https://meincmagazine.com/gaming/2017...ame-er-50-of-them/?comments=1&comments-page=1
At that time, they had 35 playable games they demoed:
https://meincmagazine.com/gaming/2017...-of-ufo-50s-games-are-instant-retro-classics/
Although part of the reason for the long development was that work was split between this and Spelunky 2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_50#Development
Meanwhile, the estimates I can find for developing an NES game seem to average 6-12 months, although some were shorter. Mega Man 2 took only three to four months.

With 50 games over 96 months, that's an average of 1.92 months per game, although I'm guessing all the games benefitted from the extended development cycle, where they were able to review games months to years later with new ideas and tweaks/polish before releasing them all.

September 16, 2024 at 6:26 pm