I filed this issue of Pushing Buttons late, because I have become obsessed with a 1985 strategy game about armies of warring dinosaurs. It’s called Avianos, and it’s part of an anthology of 50 games made in the 1980s by a little-known but influential developer, UFO Soft.
One minor detail: UFO Soft is fictional. All the games in this collection were made by a small group of modern developers. This anthology, UFO 50 (out today), is at once a tribute to imaginary 1980s game history and real 1980s game history. It impeccably imitates the look, feel and experimental creativity of the era, without the technical limitations.
These games aren’t mini-games – they’re substantial. I’ve played one Metroid-styled space adventure for over an hour and I don’t think I’m anywhere near completing it. I did complete the dinosaur war game, and it took a whole morning. I’m stuck currently midway through a game about guiding a little chameleon through predator-ridden levels. Many are multiplayer; there’s sports, strategy, side-scrolling shooters, puzzlers, and an infuriatingly difficult early GTA-style Crazy Taxi top-down racer about delivering onions. They are inspired by 1980s game history, but not limited by it: there are genres here that didn’t exist back then, and none of them goes quite so far as to simulate loading a game from a floppy disc – though the first game in the collection, Barbuta (1982), does charmingly make that telltale buzzing sound every time you enter a new screen.
The sheer devotion to the bit here is astounding. Whenever you load up a new game, a simple animation shows the dust being blown from the disk. You could really believe that you were raiding a collection of unusual games from 40 years ago, with their weird colours and two-frame animations, even the movement patterns of enemies, and those early-platformer jumps that feel weighed down by extra gravity. I was not alive for this era of gaming history, so I enlisted my partner, who was, for an authenticity check: aside from the fact that some of these games are “too good for the 80s”, he says they remind him most of the Amiga in style. From 1983 through to 1989, they become increasingly sophisticated: it’s like you’re watching the evolution of games at a fascinating time in their history, except all of it is made up.
I’ve played maybe 20 of them so far. As anyone who’s ever messed about with arcade emulation knows, when you have so many games available to you, the temptation is to play each for about 90 seconds before forgetting about them. But that would be a tragedy here, because most of these are deeper than a two-minute arcade flutter. If there’s one thing that unites all of them, it’s that you have to learn them by trial and error. There’s very little in the way of instruction, outside of maybe a few lines of text on the title screen. For my first few goes on each game, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and died instantly. And you know what? It was refreshing.
It reminds me of Shovel Knight, the splendid retro-style platformer that took the very best bits of 8-bit games and made something new out of them. But Shovel Knight is just one game, and this is, once again, fifty games. One of them, an RPG called Grimstone, is 20 hours long, according to lead developer Derek Yu. Yu, who is most famous for Spelunky (what a game), worked with five other indie developers for over nine years to create this anthology, and because each game is a passion project, every one of them feels personal, almost intimate. The scale and generosity of what they’ve come up with here is quietly astounding.
When we interviewed Yu about UFO 50 a couple of months ago, he said that what appealed most to this small developer supergroup was the “mystery and allure” of 1980s games. “You weren’t always sure what kind of experience you were in for, and that alone added an air of tension and excitement,” he said. “They weren’t afraid to let you get a little lost as you played. Despite the limitations of the hardware, they felt more adventurous in their design … The graphics weren’t realistic, but the world felt so incredibly real to me.”
UFO 50 has conjured that same feeling in me: every new game feels like a small mystery. Once you figure out how they work, they start to open up their little worlds to you, and you see the imagination behind them, and feel a connection with the developer who made them. I think it’s a feeling that everybody who played games in the medium’s earlier days will recognise.
What to play
The Messenger is another superb indie game that feels like a lost classic from a bygone era. It’s a 16-bit-styled action game with elements of Prince of Persia, Metroid and, most obviously, Ninja Gaiden – but with the self-referential humour of the late 2010s. And while we’re on this track: not nearly enough people played Iconoclasts, a splendid Mega Drive-reminiscent platformer with a story more adventurous than anything I played back in the 90s.
Available on: PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One
Estimated playtime: 10-12 hours
What to read
Remember 2014’s Flappy Bird, the iPhone game that had tens of millions of people playing in the early days of the smartphone gaming boom? It is being resurrected – but not by its original creator, Dong Nguyen, who has said he has nothing to do with it.
The new Xbox Game Pass pricing and tiers rolled out last week, and remains very confusing. Kotaku found a lot of big games missing from the mid-range Standard £11-a-month option, including Starfield, COD and Diablo IV.
The entire staff of (excellent) arthouse game publisher Annapurna Interactive (of Stray and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, among lots more) walked out last week, leaving developers and journalists alike scrambling to figure out what was going on. Gamesindustry.biz has a rundown of potentially affected games.
Luke Plunkett at Aftermath asks developers who’ve left the video game industry behind after the redundancies bloodbath of the past couple of years what they’re doing now, and finds former games programmers and artists now repairing bikes, working as cooks, and training to be botanists. Many of them say they’re happier.
What to click
Fable at 20: a uniquely British video game with a complex legacy
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: a video game that will whip film fans into a frenzy
Question Block
A question this week for the readership, from Matt:
“I grew up playing countless first-person games from Wolfenstein to Portal with no issues whatsoever. But in recent years first-person games make me motion sick, often quickly, to the extent that I’ve all but given up on the genre - it’s the main reason I was pretty underwhelmed by the Indiana Jones game reveal. I think modern games with their shaky cameras and motion blur are likely to blame, but I wondered if you or any of your readers have experienced something similar in adulthood, and any tips for overcoming it would be hugely appreciated!”
This is a surprisingly common problem – I’ve had the same question from many people over the years. I’ve had it myself from time to time, with particular games. All modern games let you play about with the settings, adjusting the motion blur, speed of movement, field of view and centre-screen cursor visibility. One of these settings usually sorts it for me, but I’ll open this one up to the readers: has anyone got any further tips for Matt?
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
