UFO 50

UFO 50 is what you might call a high-concept game. More accurately, it’s a collection of 50 games, all released by UFO Soft in the 1980s. The only thing is…UFO Soft doesn’t exist. (That’s the high-concept part.) These are actually 50 brand new games, all of which conceivably could have been made in the 1980s, but weren’t. In my longer impressions piece, I wrote that playing it feels kinda like being dropped off at your grandparents’ house as a kid and finding that they have some dusty old console in a corner and a whole library of games you know nothing about. You may not love each and every one of them, but part of the fun is in the discovery of what each one offers, and sometimes in initially being baffled by a game, but persisting with it long enough that it clicks into place and you find something you actually really like.

In this way, it offers a specific kind of gaming experience that was fairly common for young people in the 1980s, but is increasingly scarce now, in the era of elaborate gaming tutorials and heaps of online information. It also offers such a wonderful variety of experiences, many with little connections to each other—mascots or images from one series appearing in another, for instance, in ways that reminded me a bit of Capcom’s yashichi—that it convincingly creates this fictional pocket dimension in which UFO Soft actually existed. And in doing that, it also serves as a wonderful tribute to one of the most exciting eras in game development, and the people whose visions and hard work fueled it. UFO 50 is an astounding accomplishment. — Carolyn Petit