Dan Sinker/blog

I wasn't allowed to have videogames when I was a kid, so I chose my friends based in part on who had a game system at home. Alan had an Atari and a pile of games. Geoff had an Apple II and Kareteka. A kid who moved out of town in third grade had an Intellivision, with its one-of-a-kind dial controllers. A few years later, a younger cousin got a Super Nintendo and getting a babysitting job over there meant getting to play Zelda. I didn't get my own game system until I moved out at 17 and bought a Sega Genesis and lost hours to Sonic's quest for golden rings.

This is a long way to say that the 8 bit nostalgia that runs through UFO 50—a new, mindblowing, indie game that came out on Steam last week—is both familiar and (like the song says) not too familiar. Its limited color palate, chunky bitmaps, and chiptune songs feel like a language I know, but didn't grow up speaking. And yet it's an enthralling language that has had me fully obsessed for the last few days.

I'm doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it's actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of. The premise, told in bitmapped stills in the opening menu, is this: A group of game developers discovered a long-forgotten 1980s game console, the LX, in an abandoned storage locker. They work to port the system to a PC, and then emulate 50 of the best games produced for the LX console by UFO Soft from 1982-1989. Those 50 games are packaged together in UFO 50 and, in addition to the basic rules and gameplay information, each one comes with a small backstory of its development and the date it was published.

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