There’s a maxim in game development that every project is always six months from being finished. Multiply that by 50, and you can understand why UFO 50 has been so long in the making. But finally this compendium of ’80s-styled games – designed around the specifications of a console that never existed – is almost ready for launch. In Edge 397’s exclusive cover feature, we talk to the creative team and play every one of those 50 games.
Conceived by Spelunky creator Derek Yu and his childhood friend Jon Perry, and put together with a superteam of indie collaborators, UFO 50 tells the story of UFO Soft, a developer that, between 1982 and 1989, made the Lazer-X system and its library of games. In a case of life imitating art, making those games also took eight years for real. “We worked out, how long would it take a game company to make this?” Perry says. “But for some reason we didn’t include ourselves in that simulation.”
