If I had to pin this impossible, improbable thing down, I would tell you that UFO 50 is a game about memory. Or it’s a game collection about memory, anyway, as it contains 50 of the things. It’s about the memories of what games used to be like in the 8-bit era when a lot of us were kids, but it’s also about what it was like to encounter games back then. Maybe you borrowed a bunch of carts from a friend and they picked a few at random. Maybe you found one in a store on sale and it didn’t have its instruction manual or box anymore. Maybe you did a Blockbusters haul one Friday and came home with six or seven unknowns to play through and discover.
And, speaking to Derek Yu, the person behind Spelunky, and the creator, along with a handful of collaborators, of the games in UFO 50, it sounds like it all began with memories too. “It really started with me and my old friend Jon Perry wanting to make another video game together after many years,” Yu tells me when we chat. “As kids, we released some freeware games as ‘Blackeye Software’. Our final game, Eternal Daughter, took a couple of years to finish, but otherwise they were smaller games that took maybe a month of development at most.”
Yu and Perry used Klik & Play, a fairly legendary game creation tool, to make their games, and it was the launch that both of them needed to get into development. Perry moved from video games to card games, so when they were thinking of working together again, Yu suggested his friend make some prototypes in GameMaker to get a feel for it once more. “But it occurred to me,” Yu says. “If he’s going to be making some small games, something we both enjoyed doing as Blackeye Software, why not just keep doing that? The only trouble with that idea was that it’s not easy to sell small games now and our freeware days were pretty much over.” That’s how UFO 50’s collection concept came about – a big game made of small games. Although, granted, Yu prefers not to call the games small. “Some of them are pretty sizable!”
UFO 50 is a fascinating thing, but it’s surprisingly daunting at first. Faced with all these games unlocked from the off, I personally found myself frozen for a few seconds wondering where to start. Over time, I ended up feeling that this was the perfect way to approach the collection, but I have wondered if Yu and his colleagues ever thought of leading people into it differently?