Launching in 2018 for PC and possibly consoles, UFO 50 is developed by a team of indie developers that includes Spelunky designer Derek Yu, Downwell composer Eirik Suhrke, and Downwell designer Ojiro Fumoto. The collection will contain action-platformers similar to Kid Icarus, sports games, several puzzle games, side-scrolling and top-down shooters, and beat-’em-ups in the vein of Double Dragon. From the trailer, it appears that the collection will also include a least one story-focused role-playing game.
Every game included in UFO 50 will contain a single-player mode and about a third of the games will also include multiplayer — some will be competitive, while others will be cooperative. The development team estimated that completing every game in the collection could “easily take over a hundred hours,” and clarified that the games will be “full games,” and not mini-games. Each will be a little bit smaller than the average games released during the eight-bit era.
Publisher Mossmouth even included a small bit of narrative to bind all the games together, with a “fictional company that was obscure but ahead of its time” developing all of the titles in the 1980s.
“They’re all connected by a unique 32-color palette and other restrictions we decided on to make them feel more authentic,” the developers said on the game’s website.
We have seen huge original game collections released for retro consoles in the past, but they weren’t particularly successful. The most famous of these was Action 52, an NES game that was universally reviled for its poor-quality games, including the laughably bad Cheetahmen. A similar compilation was also released for the Genesis, as well.
When UFO 50 releases next year, it will come to the PC first, with console versions coming at a later date. No final price has been set, but Mossmouth plans to make it “an easy purchase.”
