One factor I initially discovered off-putting about UFO 50 — Spelunky developer Mossmouth’s new launch that’s really a set of fifty video games that run on an imagined Nineteen Eighties console known as the LX — is that it doesn’t offer you any context for the video games, or the {hardware}, or the fictional developer UFO Comfortable. It’s only a grid of fifty video games ordered by launch date. I felt misplaced with out the fastidiously laid-out breadcrumb path of lore like that in Final Name BBS, an analogous anthology of arcane puzzle video games, or the frilly body story for incomes and amassing the fictional classic arcade cupboards within the administration recreation Arcade Paradise.
However maybe Mossmouth was smart on this resolution — that is a kind of conditions when, in case your recreation is partaking sufficient and you allow a clean house for the neighborhood, they’ll be very happy to fill it in themselves. Over on the small however energetic UFO 50 subreddit, UFO 50 heads who’ve been soaking in all of the wealthy interconnected particulars that Mossmouth packed into the video games have naturally began to role-play a world wherein the LX, and UFO Comfortable, are very a lot actual.
It began on Wednesday with a easy thread immediate from redditor DorikoBac: “Can we do the factor individuals do when fictional historical past is made and fake that the video games from UFO 50 have been our childhood video games?” DorikoBac, too younger to have owned an LX within the ’80s, imagined discovering UFO Comfortable by way of emulators within the mid-2010s.
Just a few individuals jumped into the replies with made-up tales of taking part in Bushido Ball at a Pizza Hut or watching an older brother binge on Warptank. One particular person posted a false reminiscence of the best way youngsters used to work together with the bafflingly arduous video games of the period: “Once I was a child taking part in grimstone, i was too scared to depart Nice village LOL. So as an alternative of simply not taking part in, i simply walked round that tiny village simply speaking to the NPCs time and again hoping there was one thing else I might do.” (I used to be a child within the ’80s, so I do know simply how true to life that is.)
Then, utterly deadpan in-universe posts began to roll in. A consumer known as FIST0 performed on the deliberate anachronisms in UFO 50 — a few of the video games within the assortment are retro-fied variations of extra trendy genres — by imagining what it will have been wish to play Pilot Quest, an idle/clicker recreation, in a world earlier than computer systems might run a number of apps on the identical time. “Was it a much more punishing expertise, or by some means extra rewarding, understanding you earned your development via taking part in the sport? Or have been individuals simply cheesing the sport again then by leaving the LX on within the background whereas utilizing the TV to watching Stick Stickly on Nickelodeon or TMNT VHS’s?” When one other consumer declared that the LX would use its inside clock to calculate the assets generated when you turned it off or performed one thing else, others performed alongside by pretending they’d been blind to this characteristic after they have been youngsters — as so many gamers have been again then, when video games didn’t clarify themselves effectively and when you misplaced the guide, you have been by yourself. The UFO 50 redditors are nice at staying in character and bending errors or discrepancies again to the joke, making them one other pleasant a part of the fiction.
UFO 50 redditors are even making it enjoyable when individuals unintentionally break the phantasm. When somebody talked about taking part in Occasion Home concurrently Pilot Quest, the OP replied: “Oh shit, you modded your LX with the twin cartridge switcher? I heard these issues have been like $1500 again then, and fewer than 100 individuals owned them.”
One other deeply in-fiction put up from RT-55J credit Mossmouth (in its fictional position of discoverer and remasterer of the UFO Comfortable catalog) with fixing the excessive rating tables that had been corrupted in emulated ROMs of LX video games for years. “As you could recall there’s an infamously frequent dump of the Large Bell Race the place all of the saved occasions are 00:00.000 so that they’re unattainable to beat… I respect that Mossmouth went via the additional effort to search out the unique grasp disks or (within the couple circumstances the place these weren’t accessible) sift via paper copies of the supply code for the unique values.”
Issues at the moment are getting much more elaborate, with one UFO 50 fan mocking up an advert for the LX in typical button-pushing Nineteen Eighties/’90s fashion that “ran within the February 1986 situation of Girls’s {Hardware} Month-to-month” (not an actual journal, sadly).
Have a look at that LX, what a fantastic machine! I bear in mind after I noticed one in a pawn store in Canterbury, it will need to have been in round 1998, for £65. The case was cracked and it solely had one working controller, but it surely got here with the unique guide and copies of Mortol 2 and Onion Supply. And I didn’t purchase it! I’ve regretted that ever since. Think about how a lot it’d be value now!
