UFO 50 Is A Throwback Without Cheap Nostalgia

It might seem odd to suggest that a game filled to the brim with tough-as-nails twitch action games, thinky arcade puzzlers, and even a full-blown narrative RPG is not nostalgic, but UFO 50, a compilation of 50 retro-inspired games of varying sizes, is full of surprises. It has its influences, of course. Magical Garden pulls on Snake. Valtress is something of a cross between Kid Icarus and Downwell. It has a steady dedication to looking and sounding like games of the past. However, UFO 50 draws as much on 2000s era game jam culture as the NES itself. Rather than a mere evocation of retro titles, UFO 50 has a longing for creative constriction. Each individual game’s simplicity serves a widening and deepening, a desire to pull as much as possible out of every pixel. UFO 50 creates the feeling of wide-openness, that video games can be anything. This is a feeling that has only thrived on the margins in video games and thus un-markable as a generalized nostalgia. When big business wants you to believe the new hotness represents all that video games can be, it is refreshing to look backward and forward at once.

To my mind, UFO 50’s retro aesthetic serves two purposes. First, it keeps games resource-light. Each game is bare in construction, often lacking explicit tutorialization. Most games have a mere six buttons to play with. It maintains the mysterious workings and iterations of arcade games, without the quarter-munching business model. Each game can only be so big lest it outscope the rest. So, the focus is on mechanical density and complexity, on the kind of replayability that comes from careful design, not endless racks of content. The feeling is closer to setting up an emulator loaded with cult classics than to a childhood memory of getting an 8-bit console for Christmas.

Second, the retro vibes focus on each game’s individual decisions and ideas. Some of UFO 50’s games–like Campanella, its sequel, and The Big Bell Race–have obvious relationships to each other. Others–like the surreal Waldorf’s Journey and the strategic Avianos–feel as if they come from different worlds. However, all of UFO 50’s games feel as if they are made of the same component parts: pixels, code, a few buttons. Yet there is so much possibility. The simplicity draws out the span of what is possible. It makes each new trick feel remarkable.

One of UFO 50’s most-striking games is Mooncat, a two-button platform puzzler. Most of the game, at least on the first run, is found in learning how it works. You control a two-legged creature, presumably the titular mooncat, which moves in combinations and timings between its two buttons. There’s a jump, a ground pound, a little dash, and the basic movement left to right, but none of these moves are done in the conventional way; all prior knowledge of how video games are “supposed” to work vanishes. The art direction is whimsical and odd, but with no small amount of menace. Green fields populated by little critters turn into ancient tombs interlaced with gigantic skeletons and harsh deserts overseen by a red sky. It is the sort of game that is difficult to imagine being an actual commercial product, even in 1985. Its presence among more straightforward games showcases that UFO 50 is experimental. Sometimes its offerings will fit into genre conventions, but often they won’t.

Fittingly, UFO 50’s meta-narrative focuses on unearthing a forgotten catalog rather than revisiting classics. Its opening “cutscene” shows members of the UFO 50 team finding the game’s fictional console in an old storage unit. This is not something enshrined in the annals of gaming history or the kind of thing you could (easily) discover at your local retro shop. It’s overlooked. That’s the reason the game opens on a storage unit rather than a mom-and-pop shop or a lovingly maintained collection (contrast this with retro collections like The Sega Master Collection, which features a main menu designed like a childhood bedroom). UFO 50’s main menu focuses on the games themselves, showing cartridges. But they are not arranged on a shelf; instead, they are covered in cobwebs. Selecting a game you haven’t yet played dusts it off. It’s cutesy to be sure, but it conjures the archive more than the basement.

All this is to say, UFO 50 presents itself as an excavation rather than a return to the past. It wants you to discover, not to rediscover. There is no past to return to. Even in UFO 50’s internal fiction, you are playing these games right now, not in some imaginary 1980s. The emphasis on discovery has a double effect: It helps these games feel alive and helps you approach them on their own merits, not just as mere echoes of the past. It is uncloying, dignified, but still playful.

I’ve made a lot of UFO 50’s reduction, but it is also excessive. It’s 50 whole games! It would be possible to write at length about any of them individually. But its excess is found in the wealth of its experience, in the diversity it presents itself with. Most big-budget video games are large and excessive, but they tend to emphasize the same tasks over and over and all feed into some meta goal. While it would take over a hundred hours to completely finish every one of UFO 50’s offerings, each game is also a complete experience in and of itself.

There’s some melancholy to UFO 50’s unique position. Critic Liz Ryerson describes UFO 50 as “about a sort of lost innocence for games and what they could be before they became a massive dominant cultural industry.” Now video games, or at least the business of video games, is a relatively narrow set of genres. Open worlds have codified into Ubisoft bloat. Live-service games chase the brand integration of Fortnite or the expansion of Genshin Impact. Call of Duty has been the dominant first-person shooter for well over a decade. Mainstream games have lost their experimental edge. UFO 50 is perhaps the biggest scale that an experimental game can operate in. That’s still pretty small.

Nevertheless, UFO 50 is worth celebrating. I have often lamented the lack of Martin Scorceses in video games. I don’t long for more crime dramas or invocations of Catholic dread, but rather I want more game developers that admire video games’ past. I want more developers who gesture to history not out of empty, preening nostalgia, but rather out of respect for it, out of a genuine willingness to learn from it, and a desire, not to replace or improve the past, but to expand and deepen our relationship to it. UFO 50 is a small but confident and exciting step in that direction.

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