On UFO 50 and ever-flowering cycles of the simplest game designs.

Things mentioned in this episode:

The cover artwork for this episode uses the image “Nokia 3310 mobile phone, 2000” from the Science & Society Picture Library.

Full transcript:

A six-person, eight-year project helmed by Derek Yu after he made bank with Spelunky in the early 2010s, the absurdly audacious work called UFO 50 gives us a pirate ROM cartridge from an alternate universe. It contains fifty wholly original video games for an entirely notional 1980s console, spanning the complete ludography of UFO Soft, a game publisher that never existed.

Carl Muckenhoupt quipped online that: “The basic fantasy behind UFO 50 is having something that’s like your Steam library, but of manageable size.” Much like my own real Steam library, I suspect I’ll never thoroughly explore every corner of UFO 50—and this is hardly a complaint.

Initially released on Steam for Windows, UFO 50 fits perfectly on the Steam Deck, transforming your hand-held device into a Game Boy from another dimension. And one of the many joys I have so far discovered within its collection is a slippery and disguised adaptation of a ubiquitous yet seldom discussed mobile game with a particularly cyclical history.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

If we wish to play along with the fiction of UFO 50, it’s better to think of it as a visitor from an alternate reality than a forgotten historical artifact.

The developers have adhered to the spirit of the 80s in some ways. The aesthetics are more or less believable. While some of the more modern character designs stretch credulity, all of the games’ visuals comprise relatively simple sprites and color palettes, and the audio is entirely ruled by the square-wave effects that we still associate with the era. At least as significantly, the control scheme is strictly that of a mid-80s console: An eight-way D-pad, two action buttons, and that’s all.

But the authors of UFO 50 gave themselves far fewer restrictions on pinning the games’ design to their putative era. For example, the game called Rock On! Island is unmistakably a 21st century tower defense game, and Party House is a solitaire deckbuilding game, relying on a tabletop mechanic that wouldn’t exist until nearly 2010. They’re both good games, and honestly? Their overt anachronism is part of the fun!

When arranged in their default faux-chronological order, the collections’ first and last games both feel like much more sincere attempts to emulate designs popular in their respective quote-unquote publication years. The very first game, Barbuta, is a mulishly janky pre-Mario Bros. platform game, and Cyber Owls is an entirely believable cash-in on the late-80s craze for ninja-turtles clones. These two bookends give the other 48 games period-appropriate cover—literally!— to get a little historically unbound with their mechanics, which I find delightfully clever.

This sets the table for one of my favorite titles of the collection, even though it’s one of the simplest. Magic Garden is the fifth of the fifty, and has the look of a simple arcade game. You control a little girl who skips around a square playfield, collecting cute, blobby creatures called Oppies and leading them into safe zones, while avoiding obstacles.

But things start to feel a little off pretty quickly, especially if you have any experience playing actual arcade games of the early 80s. It will probably take you mere seconds to discover that you have only one life. You will learn this when the girl careens into a wall, which knocks her down and ends the game instantly. At first, this feels bad! Jim Stormdancer has critiqued this single aspect of Magic Garden as betraying the kayfabe of the entire collection, noting—quite correctly!—that any game of the era would certainly give you three lives, enough to feel like you figured out things at least a little bit before your first game-over.

But it’s also a clue.

Despite my own initial bafflement with Magic Garden, I was interested to see folks in Discord, on Mastodon, and on gaming podcasts really hone in on analyzing this game, even though it’s hardly the deepest design in the collection. However, it is arguably the first of the UFO 50 games that feels good to play, if you’re approaching the collection chronologically, the first one that isn’t intentionally designed to feel juddery and dated. Once you brush aside the single-life quirk the appeal is immediate: Save oppies, stay alive, and get that score as high as you can!

So, I kept Magic Garden on my UFO 50 play rotation. And at some point, I tried it during phone calls with older members of my family, who naturally ask of me a hundred-to-one listen-to-speak ratio. It became immediately clear that this was how the game wanted to be played: in fidgets. Curled on my couch, AirPods in my ears Steam Deck in my hands, I could contentedly hit that start button dozens of times in the span of one thirty-minute call.

And soon I realized: Oh, it’s Snake. The game is just a variant of Snake, straight from my old Nokia’s cracked LCD screen to you. And then everything makes sense. Of course you don’t have lives in Snake! Why would you? Snake is designed to pass just a few moments before your inevitable game-over, and if you want another bite of Snake after that, my all means press the button and carry on. In case there’s any doubt, the true identity of Magic Garden is given away by the on-screen word “Oppies”, which in retrospect is a typographical blur of “Apples”, the things you try to collect in the classic flip-phone game. A sublimely subtle checksum.

With the scales fallen from my eyes I could see that Magic Garden is actually a perfectly clever and quite original twist on its progenitor. You don’t just eat and grow until you die. The length of your snake-which is to say, the little girl plus the train of collected oppies following her—grows and shrinks as you collect and deposit the creatures. Obstacles continuously spawn, but every time you meet a dropoff quota you receive a powerup which gives you a brief window to clean up otherwise deadly enemies.

This means that you’ll occasionally encounter satisfying moments where you clear everything on the screen, and can collect oppies at leisure for a few luxurious seconds before meanies start spawning again. You end up living for these natural pauses, and they always feel great.

You’ll still die because you miss a turn, or something hemmed you in, or you just got unlucky. But again: Snake. There’s no sense of lost progress. The high score table is just there as a pole star to aim at. The game is a meditation, a voluntary focus for your attention on something immediately present, with frequent breaks.

Magic Garden isn’t even the only new and interesting take on Snake released by a well-known indie-game developer in recent years. I could for instance also point you to Snak, spelled S-N-A-K, which Zach Gage and Neven Mrgan published for the Playdate console in 2023. This one brings a very fun rail-grinding mechanic to the classic formula, and demonstrates how a contemporary game creator doesn’t need all the fictive trappings of UFO 50 to say something new about an ancient design.

With Magic Garden, we have a 1970s arcade game, revived for 1990s cell phones, reinterpreted by a 2020s game, pretending to be from the 1980s, and to which I set the full capabilities of a quad-core three gigahertz hand-held computer. I do have to appreciate how this particular snake has been eating its own tail for about as long as I’ve been alive, suggesting that the art form of video games is now just old enough to have its own multigenerational archetypes of design, with its own demonstrations of how some patterns are just… eternal.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.