The Brilliant UFO 50 Collects the Greatest ’80s Games That Never Existed

By Garrett Martin | September 18, 2024 | 1:28pm

Video Games Features ufo 50

The Brilliant UFO 50 Collects the Greatest ’80s Games That Never Existed

It’s really hard to review UFO 50. It’s not something you can speed through in a week and then dash off 1000 words about. That’s because the new game from Mossmouth is actually 50 games in one, and from the 20 or so I’ve played so far these aren’t just bite-sized diversions or glorified minigames. Each one would’ve been an individual, standalone release in the 1980s, something we’d have to pay $30 to $50 for at Software Etc. or Babbage’s. Back then I’d get maybe four new games a year, mostly at birthdays and holidays, and squeeze as many hours out of each one as possible, even ones I didn’t really like that much. That’s how all those obscure secrets and Easter eggs were discovered back in the ‘80s: by kids who explored every single corner of one of the few games they’d get that year. If you gave UFO 50 to a kid in 1987 it’d amount to a decade’s worth of games in one single lump.

1987 is UFO 50’s lodestar. These 50 games represent the collected works of the acclaimed ‘80s games developer known as UFOSoft, who released 50 games between 1982 and 1989 before closing up shop. Retro game collections have become a constant over the last two decades, once publishers realized they could continue to profit off the nostalgia players have for ‘80s and ‘90s hits while also introducing those games to new players every generation. Think of UFO 50 along the same lines as Capcom’s many compilations, or Nintendo’s archive of old games on Nintendo Switch Online, or the in-depth histories of the Gold Master Series. UFO 50 is conceptually like those collections, but with one crucial difference: all these old games are actually brand new.

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Yes, UFOSoft never existed. Mossmouth does, though, and with UFO 50 they’ve created an alternate history of ‘80s gaming that looks and feels just plausible enough. These 50 games, presented in “chronological” order, grow more complex and sophisticated as they progress through the ‘80s, hitting most of the major genres of the time—shmups, platformers, puzzlers, rudimentary strategy games, and more. There’s even a bit of narrative thread running throughout the package, hinting at the fictional company’s history beyond its works, for all the close readers out there. UFO 50’s designers—Derek Yu, Eirik Suhrke, Jon Perry, Paul Hubans, Ojiro Fumoto, and Tyriq Plummer—have a rich history of independent and retro-minded game development under their belts, including all-timers like Spelunky and Downwell; here they get to indulge their ‘80s-indebted whims and make up not just a passel of could’ve-been-classics but a whole interconnected gameography that sometimes cross-references and iterates on itself.

There are more highlights in UFO 50 than I can fit in a single write-up, and my personal favorite has changed multiple times in the days I’ve been playing it. I also recommend starting at the beginning, with the “1982” dungeon-crawling platformer Barbuta. It feels like a direct nod to the early PC games of Ultimate Play the Game, the British studio that went on to become Rare; it’s obtuse, challenging, and, um, not particularly fun to play. It’s smart to establish a baseline, though, before digging into later, more advanced games, to see how game development in the real world (and UFOSoft in the game’s fiction) evolved throughout the ‘80s.

By the mid ‘80s section UFO 50 hits the sweet spot. There’s a run of games in the middle of the package that each hooked me hard in very different ways. Foremost among them might be Porgy, an underwater adventure that welds the free-roaming exploration and backtracking of a Metroid with cute-’em-up mechanics and aesthetics and the pressure of a clear, definitive deadline for each run. You also pilot a submarine that looks like Garfield when it dies. It’s adorable, and looks and feels like it could actually be a game from 1986, albeit with an ingenious and complex design that probably wouldn’t be possible without 40 years of hindsight. Other favorites include Waldorf’s Journey, which is part Balloon Fight, part Angry Birds, and all walrus; Party House, a strategy game where you need to find the right balance of popularity and money while throwing house parties and avoiding too much rowdiness and horseplay; Bushido Ball, a one-on-one Super Dodge Ball riff with samurais; and Avianos, a tactics game similar to Defender of the Crown about birds devolving into constant war after they inherit the planet from a human race that destroyed itself.

If those concepts sound inspired, well, that’s one of the things that makes UFO 50 so great—probably too great to be a genuinely realistic fake ‘80s collection. There’s no laziness here, no hack jobs or quick cash-ins; every game has a cool or quirky angle to it, both narratively and mechanically, that puts them more in line with the kind of smart, retro-style independent games from the 2000s and 2010s that UFO 50’s designers are known for than the often limited and uninspired fare that even the best studios cranked out in the ‘80s. It took Mossmouth almost a decade to make UFO 50, which was originally aiming for a 2018 release; that roughly matches the amount of fictional time covered by the game, but I can’t think of any real studio or group of designers in the ‘80s who created a body of work as varied, thoughtful, substantial, and consistently interesting as UFO 50. Yu and crew don’t just evoke the most seminal decade for videogames here; they one-up it at almost every turn.

Ultimately it’s not just the sheer volume of UFO 50 that confounds a conventional review. It’s that extreme attention to detail, the commitment to making almost every element of these games clever and unique. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it seems like Mossmouth never took a single shortcut at any point during the development of UFO 50, and that puts it ahead of not just the classic era it pays tribute to, but pretty much every era of games development. It took them almost 10 years to make something this deep and brilliant, and I imagine it might take us just as long to fully uncover its riches.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.