'How far can you push this one idea?': The UFO 50 team discusses the making of the most bonkers and beautifully weird gaming achievement of 2024

GamesActionUFO 50’How far can you push this one idea?': The UFO 50 team discusses the making of the most bonkers and beautifully weird gaming achievement of 2024When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Mossmouth)

UFO 50

For all its ebullience, and for all its palpable enthusiasm for the medium, there’s somethingdeeply weirdaboutUFO 50. The 50-game collection draws its power from constraints: the fictional hardware at its heart, the LX, is an 8-bit system with a 32-colour limit. The resulting aesthetic is immediately recognisable: Everyone knows the Nintendo and Sega systems of this era.

But people are less likely to know about the ZX Spectrum, and I’ll bet few are familiar with the Amstrad CPC 464 mascotRoland. Most people know about the Commodore 64, but can they name five games? (And if so, why isn’t one of themMad Nurse?) The systems you never got to play are gaps in the continuum. In the internet age, dipping into the catalogue of the MSX platform, or the PC-8800 series of home computers, feels like visiting an alternate vision of the future that just didn’t take.

UFO 50 channels this uncanny atmosphere for me, telling the story of a mysterious 1980s game development studio while keeping to that most fundamental of storytelling tenets: show, don’t tell. Mossmouth isn’ttelling the storyof UFOsoft: it’s bringing it to life in the form of a whole game catalogue. UFOSoft now exists, and the sensibilities of its four central fictional developers don’t fit neatly with the canon.

“In general, I’ve been very attracted to the aesthetics of computers and consoles that I never owned,” said Derek Yu, Mossmouth founder, Spelunky creator, and one of the six UFO 50 developers.

(Image credit: Mossmouth)

UFO 50

Plummer is the youngest on the UFO 50 team, so he never experienced the 8-bit era first hand: his exposure to those games of yore is via emulation. Yu, for his part, said he feels more indebted to MS-DOS games, while Jon Perry—a tabletop designer who has made games with Yu since childhood—points to early ’90s browser and freeware games as points of reference (Derek and Jon used the now defunct Klik and Play toolset to make games way back then). As for Paul Hubans—creator of The Indie Game Legend and the forthcoming Madhouse—he had the NES firmly in his sights while developing UFO 50.

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The game was announced in 2017. Back then, Yutold usthat it’d be out the following year. “If we really analysed it upfront and realised it was going to take eight years or whatever, we might not have dived in,” Suhrke said about missing that optimistic deadline.

(Image credit: Mossmouth)

UFO 50

“We both played all of them a little bit, but yeah… I’ve been watching on Twitch and just seeing new stuff constantly,” Suhrke said. “No one has the full picture.”

“It’s interesting to see where we overlap on games,” Hubans said. “With Mini and Max it was very much Jon’s idea, but he let me have a lot of creative liberty with fleshing out a lot of the details at a certain level. And I kind of see that as the game where John and I overlap. Then there’s games where Derek and Jon overlap, or Eirik and Derek overlap, and so on and so forth.”

(Image credit: Mossmouth)

UFO 50

These real world designers aren’t credited according to the individual games they directed or helped make; in the fiction of UFO 50 they’re archivists. The UFOSoft team are fictional characters that aren’t, so said Perry, consistently mapped to any of the flesh world developers.

“But they map a little bit,” he admits, “and that’s just because we all have our own recognizable styles and tics that appear. So it’s not like we would roleplay the same character and make multiple games that would then get assigned to one fictional character. We wanted to produce games that had certain natural leanings and tendencies and then it just became natural to roughly assign those to fictional characters in a way that leverages the sort of trends you could already see in the games, so that the fiction would be more believable.”

(Image credit: Mossmouth)

UFO 50 Barbuta

“That game was not designed to be the first game in UFO 50 chronologically,” Yu said. “I feel like that’s important to note. We weren’t like, ‘we need a first game and it’s got to be a certain way’.

Barbuta’s spiritual successor is another Petter joint, in the form of Mooncat. It’s a platformer with a bizarre two-button approach to movement, which recalls when games didn’t have tried-and-true rules about mechanics as fundamental as movement. It was born of Suhre wanting to make a platformer for a Ludum Dare game jam with a two-button restriction (he said it took a hallucination to come up with the game concept) but it’s a perfect fit for the UFO 50 ethos.

(Image credit: Mossmouth)

UFO 50

At a time when the industry seems thoroughly down at heel, UFO 50 feels like a rarity: something a handful of people made because they wanted it to exist. Chatting to the team feels like talking to a close-knit group of friends, and none waste an opportunity to mention how muchfunit has been to work on the project. “It feels like everyday I’ve been learning from these other people who are just so good at what they do and invested in making something really cool, and finding a way to connect everything has been extremely gratifying as a game designer,” Yu said. “It feels like you’re learning from the work and the other people all the time, every day.”

The team politely declined to discussthe uber-secretive 51st game, which appears to be a meta-narrativeabout the meta-narrative. Nor would they confirm that a 16-bit UFO collection could emerge. I get the sense that they’ll definitely be working together in the future, though.

“This has been bootcamp for me,” Suhrke said. “I think I’ve become very good at making UFOSoft games. Give me a tube for nutrition and I can keep cranking these out. Assuming I personally keep making games, you’re going to see stuff [from me] that feels like it has the DNA of UFOSoft in it; It’s sort of like a chicken and egg.”

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