When you open UFO 50 you’re quickly dropped into a grid menu showing 50 pixel art thumbnails for 50 8-bit games. It’s hard to know where to start: should I start with the first? Should I choose at random? Since the default list order runs chronologically, should I play the last, because that one might represent the creative apex of fictional studio UFOSoft?
It doesn’t really matter, in the end, because there’s a lot. I’ve been absorbed by point ‘n’ click horror Night Manor for the past few days, but when I first booted the game I got sucked into Barbuta and Bushido Ball and neglected the other 48 games for days. I’ve gone through a Walforf’s Journey phase too, and I’ve completed some levels in Camouflage and Block Koala. I’ve definitely not completed any of the games.
No one should feel bad or slow for not completing any UFO 50 games as yet because, during a recent chat with the Mossmouth team, I learned that no one on the team has completed all the games either. And they made it.
“No, not at all,” Eirik Suhrke said when I asked if he (or anyone else) had finished all the games. “It’s too much. We all similarly played all of them a little bit, but yeah, I’ve been watching stuff on Twitch and just seeing new stuff constantly. No one has the full picture.”
UFO 50’s Paul Hubans said he hasn’t even played past the first level of Campanella 3, for example, despite having invested “hundreds of hours” testing the collection in addition to being a designer.
“You need to focus on one level (game) at a time,” Suhrke went on. “You’ve got to just black out 49 other games for a little while in order to make any progress. Whenever I thought about the whole thing I would get very dizzy and overwhelmed and I’d have to go for a walk and then just try to block out as much of it as I could. It’s only now that I’m seeing the full power of the whole thing come together.”
Tyriq Plummer says that the way early players are reacting to the game–their surprise at its extent–is close to how he himself felt when he saw how it finally came together. “It’s one of those things where even though it’s such a large and broad encompassing kind of project, it still manages to feel more than the sum of its parts,” he said. “And that’s something that was hard to get a sense of when I was working on it. But everyone else is saying now that there’s way more to this than I even realized. It’s super cool.”
Derek Yu agrees. “I think that’s always the best, when you’re surprised by the game that you’re working on, and I think that’s partly why it’s been so enjoyable to work on it for all these years. We’re constantly sharing and surprising each other.”
According to our review UFO 50 is a “a superb retro-style smorgasbord”. I spoke at length with most of the Mossmouth team earlier this week, and you can read all about that here.