The creator of Spelunky, plus a supergroup of indie developers, have spent the best part of a decade making 50 games. Has the journey been worth it?
Six and a half years have passed since we previously talked with Derek Yu and Jon Perry about UFO 50, and to play 35 of the 50 games planned for this ludicrously ambitious collection. At the time, we concluded: “There’s still plenty of work to be done if it’s to hit its planned launch late next year”. Looking back, it’s hard not to detect a note of caution in our words – one that perhaps should have been a full-blown symphony. A project that was originally expected to take two to three years will – provided the Mossmouth team can stick to their new release window of late 2024 – have taken just over eight. So, upon reconvening with the pair after all this time, our first question can only be: what happened? “Fifty games!” Perry laughs. “Who knew that it would take so long to make 50 games? Who could have possibly guessed?”
For his part, Yu points towards an axiom we’ve heard from many developers over the years, that games always seem to be six months from being done. Here, though, that effect was multiplied over and over. “That number, 50, is pretty hard to wrap your head around,” he says. “A task that takes a week? That’s not a long time in game-development terms. But you multiply it by 50, and that’s a whole year.”
Not that they ever considered reducing the number, he insists: “Fifty was the first threshold where it really just punched you in the face.” Early in development, Perry suggested halving the number. “To me, 25… it just felt like half of 50,” Yu says. “Like a halfway point.” That conversation was long before the scope of the undertaking had become apparent, he adds: “It was pretty unclear, at that point, how involved each game was going to be.” Now, though, as the project finally nears its end, Perry has begun to wonder if the developers mightn’t have simply chosen to ignore the reality of what lay ahead of them.
“We have this backstory of this fictional company, UFO Soft,” he explains. The game begins with photographic stills showing Yu and Perry, two members of the ‘UFO 50 Recovery Team’, cracking open a storage locker to discover a long-lost Lazer-X system. UFO Soft not only produced this hardware but kept it fed with games – the very same ones you’re about to play. “Pretty early on, we mapped out the chronology of that company, how long we expected it to take them to make 50 games,” Perry says. Accordingly, the games in the collection are dated by their release date, from 1982 and 1989. Eight years.
