Six and a half years have passed since we previously talked with Derek Yu and Jon Perry about UFO 50, and to play 35 of the 50 games planned for this ludicrously ambitious collection. At the time, we concluded: “There’s still plenty of work to be done if it’s to hit its planned launch late next year”. Looking back, it’s hard not to detect a note of caution in our words – one that perhaps should have been a full-blown symphony. A project that was originally expected to take two to three years will – provided the Mossmouth team can stick to their new release window of late 2024 – have taken just over eight. So, upon reconvening with the pair after all this time, our first question can only be: what happened? “Fifty games!” Perry laughs. “Who knew that it would take so long to make 50 games? Who could have possibly guessed?”
For his part, Yu points towards an axiom we’ve heard from many developers over the years, that games always seem to be six months from being done. Here, though, that effect was multiplied over and over. “That number, 50, is pretty hard to wrap your head around,” he says. “A task that takes a week? That’s not a long time in game-development terms. But you multiply it by 50, and that’s a whole year.”
Not that they ever considered reducing the number, he insists: “Fifty was the first threshold where it really just punched you in the face.” Early in development, Perry suggested halving the number. “To me, 25… it just felt like half of 50,” Yu says. “Like a halfway point.” That conversation was long before the scope of the undertaking had become apparent, he adds: “It was pretty unclear, at that point, how involved each game was going to be.” Now, though, as the project finally nears its end, Perry has begun to wonder if the developers mightn’t have simply chosen to ignore the reality of what lay ahead of them.
“We have this backstory of this fictional company, UFO Soft,” he explains. The game begins with photographic stills showing Yu and Perry, two members of the ‘UFO 50 Recovery Team’, cracking open a storage locker to discover a long-lost Lazer-X system. UFO Soft not only produced this hardware but kept it fed with games – the very same ones you’re about to play. “Pretty early on, we mapped out the chronology of that company, how long we expected it to take them to make 50 games,” Perry says. Accordingly, the games in the collection are dated by their release date, from 1982 and 1989. Eight years.
“So, on some subconscious level, I think we knew,” Perry shrugs. “We worked out, how long would it take a game company to make this? But for some reason we didn’t include ourselves in that simulation. Maybe it’s easier to think honestly about fictional characters than yourself.”
Later, Eirik Suhrke tells us he has come to a similar conclusion: “I think we kind of knew, but we just let ourselves not think about it.” But whatever the case, he’s glad it worked out this way. “Fortunately, we allowed ourselves to be a little bit naïve,” he says. “I don’t think we would ever have done this if we’d comprehended exactly how much work it would be.” In Suhrke’s case, that has meant not only designing and programming his fair share of these games, but also producing the music and audio for all 50 of them. And that’s without mentioning the other, not insignificant game he and Yu made alongside.
“Initially, I was envisioning that might come out first,” Yu says. “But as we got closer and closer to release, it just felt like that was the one that made the most sense.” The two stepped away for over a year to finish that game, leaving “Jon and Paul [Hubans] to man the station on their own”. So, as itself approaches its fourth birthday, does Yu reckon they made the right call? “There’s an alternate timeline where we did get this collection out before. But it would really involve the games being much less polished and involved than they are now. And I think there was always room to let it be more. So we just kind of let it go where it needed to go.” Suhrke puts it in a way that brings all those extra years into immediate focus:
