ufo 50 comments

UFO 50:

i think of this game as more of a fantasy version of what 1980's gamedev could be - like an amalgam of a bunch of different ideas ambiently floating around the games of that time but re-told through the lens of a tigsource game jam sensibility. like how Barbuta feels like one of those ZX Spectrum platformers like Jet Set Willy but is seemingly a bit self-aware about that, or Planet Zoldath kinda has the sensibility of like a c-tier NES game made by some company like Micronics but then it has more modern No Man's Sky-type resource collecting mechanics thrown on top of that. a lot of the games are like that. they have the abruptness of a lot of 80's NES or arcade or computer games but there's a depth you wished those games could have had there but wasn't there most of the time. either because of hardware limitations, audience expectations, game budgets, or whatever else.

i think really that's what a lot of nostalgia is about - what something felt like it was, perhaps more than what it actually was. and in doing so perhaps UFO50 also exists (at least implicitly) in recognition to the fact that 00's/early 2010's tigsource has become as much a historical period of game history that has now passed us by as the 80's were. to a lot of us, there's a big sadness to that. it feels sad how much games have seemingly become about everything else than the process of creation and experimentation. indie games have become a bigger part of the industry, and more bigger games are made than ever. but the space often feels unrecognizable to what it was - increasingly focused on marketing and polish and emulating a lot about AAA games that the original indie game wave was reacting against. and there's a sadness in realization there. the time eventually has to end: the company inevitably has to go out of business, just like UFO Soft does... and just like a lot of beloved companies did in the 90's and 00's when the winds shifted and they couldn't keep going.

i guess my one misgiving here (beyond my complaints about the difficulty of some of the more twitch action games) is less about the actual game itself and more that i feel like you have to be a successful indie game dev from that period to have the time and space to make this sort of project, and for this kind of game to be metabolized and celebrated in a psuedo-mainstream context. most people didn't get that lucky, including back then. which makes UFO 50 feel like a real anomaly or something that exists out of time right now... when it really shouldn't. a game more focused on celebrating different kinds of games and what games can be rather than something that tries for a fully coherent, fully accessible experience. i've had some people i know who make games say they don't think it's "for them" perhaps because they just don't like this era of games, or they find it intimidating. and it makes me sad because i feel like it's not really about the NES or the 80's, but about a sort of lost innocence for games and what they could be before they became a massive dominant cultural industry.

the dream for me of the indie game space was in this idea that the artsy and narrative-focused side of game development could be fuse with the more formalist designer-brained side in new and interesting ways - they could work in tandem to create a completely new kind of art. but in reality those things often felt like they were being placed in opposition to each other. and i think the market invariably leads to a situation where things are increasingly divided into sub-categories and sub-genres. it becomes fully self-selecting, and people will tune out anything that isn't immediately in their wheelhouse. and it becomes increasingly rare that you get projects that try to synthesize a lot of different things at once, because there feels like increasingly less incentive from the market or audiences to do that. which is why i think this project is so valuable.... and why i also feel a sadness in wishing more things that aim to synthesize in a similar way could exist and be as celebrated in some circles as this game has, but understand that the material conditions make it really hard for that to be the case.

- liz ryerson