UFO 50
Play Forever
Being ahead of your time means people of your time not knowing to appreciate you. One of the best examples of this in gaming is UFO Soft. During their brief existence in the 80s they developed a total of 51 games for their advanced series of LX computers. Game 51, UFO 50, is a collection of all their games with some bonuses attached. However, while developed in the 80s, it only received a commercial release last year (and ports to modern systems obviously) due to the closure of the company, with the game having been thought lost for decades until a copy was finally dug up.
UFO 50 is much more than just a compilation. Each game is given three objectives of increasing difficulty for you to potentially aim for, garden gift, gold disk, and cherry disk.
Gold is generally just for beating the game and gives the game a gold frame in the menu. Cherry is an extra bonus challenge like reaching a certain score or 100% completion, that gives the game a cherry colored frame.
Garden gifts are the lowest rung of difficulty but have the most interesting reward. The garden is a litle display with a pig man and his house, which starts out quite empty. As you collect garden gifts the house and yard gain the items in question, and the pig man will interact with them. It’s a simple virtual pet like set up.
Since the garden gifts are comparatively easy to get, they incentivize trying out each game. Maybe the gold is too hard or you don’t like the game enough to get it, but the garden gift won’t ask as much. But they can put up a bit of a challenge too depending on the game, letting them serve as end goals if you wish.
I wish more game compilations would take this approach, it makes the collection itself feel like a game and encourages you to give things a proper chance instead of bouncing off them after a few game overs. Companies like Nintendo and Sega should start taking notes from UFO Soft on how to present their back catalog.
With 50 games it’s hard to talk about specific ones. The variety of UFO Soft’s games is incredible, their drive to experiment so great even sequels feel meaningfully distinct mechanically, not just straight upgrades or more of the same.
Many UFO Soft games laid the foundations for games that would codify entire genres. Party House and Rock On! Island are a prototype deckbuilder and tower defense respectively, the latter coming about because the developers couldn’t get the units in their strategy game to move right, so they simply removed it outright.
For me playing Grimstone and Kick Club were taste expanding experiences, the appeal of old directionless RPGs and single screen arcade games clicked when I played them. By the time I finally beat Kick Club my score was high enough that I got the cherry disc.
It’s a buffet, so it’s up to you to pick what and how you play. You may be content with just a handful of games. But if you want to dig deep, UFO 50 itself has secrets.
There is a terminal option in the pause menu that lets you inputs codes, and one that is hidden in plain sight will send you on a scavenger hunt across the entire collection. Each clue requires going to part of a game and opening the terminal, which displays the next clue. Eventually this hunt produces a new code that takes you to game 51, the story of UFO Soft itself.
I wasn’t able to reach the preservation team responsible for the game’s long awaited release or the developer of UFO 50 itself, but another UFO Soft alum, Thorson Petter, whose game began the company’s focus on video games, agreed to a brief interview over email, which I have edited for brevity.
Will: Thank you again for agreeing to speak to me. Let’s start at the beginning with your solo project Barbuta, what inspired you to start developing it?
Thorson: A bit of boredom to be honest. My work on the LX System wasn’t always easy, but it was usually boring. So I started programming a game when nobody was looking and nothing was on fire, at first just because I could. I didn’t add any sound because I was worried someone might hear me. Then I got so wrapped up in working on it that I got caught.
And as the commonly repeated story goes, you nearly got fired, but instead it inspired them to pivot to becoming a full on video game company. How exactly did that happen?
Naturally the bosses didn’t like that I had been working on a whole video game instead of my job, so I panicked and made up a story about how I thought it would be a fun bonus for customers, and it made the co-founders decide they wanted to go all in on gaming. To this day I don’t know how I pulled it off.
To jump ahead a little, Mooncat was reportedly designed as a sequel to Barbuta before becoming its own thing. What inspired you to attempt a Barbuta 2? How did it become Mooncat?
As my first game it was a little rough around the edges, and even in just a few years my understanding of how to design games had gotten deeper.
One of the biggest, and fairest in my opinion, complaints people have about Barbuta is that the movement is slow and boring when there aren’t obstacles or enemies. So I started with how to make moving more interesting, and I like games that don’t explain themselves and force you to figure things out.
Eventually this got me to make the controls themselves a sort of puzzle, people were getting better at video games in general, so I wanted something that’d recapture the feeling of not even knowing how to move. And what I had was so different from Barbuta it didn’t make sense to call it Barbuta 2 anymore, I needed a player character who looked weird enough to control weirdly, so the knight had to go.
Most of your directed games tend to have vague stories. Do you have a full picture of each game’s story yourself, like the implied connection with Barbuta in one of Mooncat’s endings?
I think it’s more interesting when there isn’t a set answer to find out, so I didn’t worry about making one. Part of the fun for me with a lot of early games is having the space to expand on it with my own imagination, things had to be implied so there was more room for interpretation.
There’s been a lot of talk about the recent release of UFO 50 and its secrets. How did you feel when you heard the news about it and the scavenger hunt in it?
I still keep in touch with some of the people from UFO Soft, but it felt unreal to have all of our old work suddenly put in the lime light again. It got all of us reminiscing a little about how much has changed since then, and how strange things got in the last few years of UFO Soft. That all feels like another lifetime.
I’m actually happy Greg used some of my games for the little scavenger hunt he made, it gives them another layer of mystery. As for the game it unlocks, well it got a lot of us from UFO Soft talking to and about each other again, I’ll say that. I’d rather put all the past company drama behind me.
UFO Soft never existed, Thorson Petter is a fictional character. That ‘interview’ was a work of fanfiction I just tricked some of you into reading.
In reality UFO Soft is a modern game pairing modern design with a faux retro aesthetic and frame narrative, one that captures the spirit of exploration and discovery with old games rather than mindlessly repeating or imitating nostalgic symbols.
It’s like a video game equivalent to the Decameron, each game works as its own individual game and can be analyzed in the context of the wider collection to reveal the characterization of the fictional game developers.
Only the hidden game gives a ‘direct’ look at the developers, which is quite clearly GREG-MILK’s caricatures of them, it’s how he views them, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt, which makes them all the more fascinating.
For me UFO 50 was the game of the year for 2024. A work so well crafted it incites my own creative impulse. I drank deeply, quickly deciding I wanted to write this, but knowing that even after 100 hours I needed to experience more.
There are still games in UFO 50 calling my name, but my goal of completing the garden and game 51 (which has a name, but I’ll leave it to you to discover) was fulfilled. It’s rare to see such a flexible game, others could have fulfilling experiences without ever learning of the 51st game. UFO 50 is about play itself, you get out what you put in.