The UFO Club
Fifty games. Five devs. A console that never existed. Welcome to the compilation exploring the history of the 1980s’ best imaginary game studio
Welcome to the compilation exploring the history of the 80s’ best imaginary game studio
This is the story of the most forward-thinking game developer you’ve never heard of. A company ahead of its time in both game design and narrative. A studio that could easily have revolutionised the medium had its games been released to the masses, but to which fate dealt a cruel hand. A team that should be feted by all modern creators – if it weren’t entirely fictional, that is.
Officially, UFO 50’ s story begins in 1983. In the real world, however, it started a few years later. In the second grade at school,
Derek Yu met Jon Perry, and the two became fast friends, with a shared interest in games. “Some of my earliest memories of hanging out with Derek are basically just sitting down and drawing pages of items and enemies and things for games we didn’t even know how
to program,” Perry recalls. “So yeah, we have a long history.”
It was with the release of Clickteam’s 1994 game-making tool Klik & Play that the pair, then in their early teens, started working together in earnest. Yu and Perry started their own studio called Blackeye Software, and began to release small games as part of the Klik & Play community. “We’d spend a weekend or maybe a week on them and put them out,” Yu tells us. “We got a good response back then and that’s kind of how my game career got started.”
By the time the two had released the last of these games, Klik & Play had been succeeded by Multimedia Fusion. In 2002, Yu and Perry released one final game under the Blackeye Software banner, freeware action-adventure
Eternal Daughter, before the two went their separate ways. “We made a small iPhone game somewhere in the middle there, and maybe a few miscellaneous projects, but we didn’t really work closely together on videogames for a while,” Yu says. “There’s this card game Time Barons, which is finally coming out this year,” Perry adds. “But these were all hobby projects.”
Around 18 months ago, Yu contacted Perry to discuss working together on a more ambitious project. Perry had spent the last five years away from videogames, finding himself more heavily involved with card and tabletop games, and so Yu encouraged him to learn Game Maker, with which he’d made the first version of Spelunky. “At some point during that conversation, it just hit me,” Yu says, “If Jon was going to learn Game Maker and make some small games again, then why not just make a whole bunch of small games together and put them together into a package?”
Fifty, Yu reckoned, felt like a good number. “It’s a strong, solid, even number, and it’s one that really packs a lot of punch,” he laughs. “My reasoning was that, if we’re going to be making small prototypes, why not make them into actual games that we can put into a compilation. I thought that would really give us a lot of freedom in terms of what the games are. Because then a single idea doesn’t need to carry the whole project.” Perry agrees.
“It’s such a freeing creative space to be in,” he says. “I think that’s what made the idea so appealing. Because we were struggling to find that one idea we were going to be comfortable marrying ourselves to for years, and this was more like a structure where we could work together and throw in a lot of ideas.”
Yu and Perry quickly realised that this was going to be too much work for just two people. So Yu contacted Eirik Suhrke, who had composed music for Spelunky and had been dabbling in Game Maker since. In the interim, Suhrke had released an action-platformer named Skorpulac, in which you play a man exploring an enemy-filled labyrinth armed with just a spear, via indie web portal Warp Door. Impressed by the game, Yu invited his former colleague to take the next step and work with him on his new project. “Derek and Jon were already talking about it but it was definitely before they had started working on it,” Suhrke recalls. “He mentioned it during the summer two years back and then we actually started working on it half a year later.”
The trio set up a private forum to discuss the project, starting a thread to collectively brainstorm game concepts before splitting the workload three ways. “We were just throwing ideas out there – whatever we could come up with that sounded interesting,” Yu says. “From there we pared it down to about 50 ideas, with each of us taking about a third. And that’s basically how it got started.” Still, they needed a hook. “Once you have a whole collection of games then the next obvious question is: what unites them?” Perry says. “And so we started thinking about what that would be.”
Having so many games to make brought its own logistical problems, and it soon became apparent that the group would have to impose certain restrictions. Given the project’s origins in Yu and Perry’s past making tiny games together, and the strong influence of Nintendo during their formative years, the notion of these games being a collection made for a fictional retro console grew organically from there. It’s an intriguing hook, and it has practical benefits, too. “What’s nice about our framing story is that, yeah, it ties the games
together thematically,” Perry says. “But also the colour limitations, the resolution limitations – these are all things that make development of the games go way faster, especially in terms of the art.”
Once the idea had been established, the group started to think about what kind of console this could be. The NES was the most obvious inspiration, but to simply adopt its specifications wouldn’t have made this imaginary device unique. So Yu, Perry and Suhrke studied the PC Engine, the MSX, and Japanese computers from the 1980s to influence the overall aesthetic – after which Yu began to assemble a 32-colour palette. “Philosophically, as far as choosing the colours goes, I didn’t really have any ideas,” he admits. “So I just started by throwing colours down that seemed to cover the spectrum: green for grass and trees, blue for sky and water, just colours that looked pleasing.”
Another rule was then introduced: each sprite in the game would get black as a ‘free’ colour, along with three others chosen from the remaining palette. Still, it’s one more than the NES gets. “We didn’t want to limit ourselves
too much,” Perry tells us. “The flexibility that we have by making this in 2017 is that it’s not any kind of actual technology that’s limiting us. Instead, we’re picking our own limitations. So the colours per sprite we made more permissive than games of that era.”
Suhrke subsequently took Yu’s work and made some refinements to create the palette
UFO 50 has now, and as the de facto composer, he established ground rules for the sound chip, which is essentially the same as the one found in the PC Engine. “It’s six channels of wavetable, and I’m using one of them for sound effects, so there’s five left for the music,” Suhrke says – and it turns out he’s particularly strict when it comes to operating within those self-imposed boundaries. “To me that’s the most appealing part of the project,” he elaborates. “I find that in general, it’s easier to be creative and productive if you have limitations. The fun part is pushing against those boundaries, so I definitely don’t bend the rules, but I do try to maximise what we have.”
In other respects, however, some paring back has been necessary. As the backstory behind the console began to take shape, the team started to consider a chronology for the games, conscious of the kind of technological advances that made late-era NES titles look so much better than its earliest games. Pick from the bottom two rows of UFO 50’ s menu screen, and you’re more likely to see bigger sprites, more colours and parallax scrolling. Meanwhile some games have had more stringent limitations imposed upon them after the fact. “We may use just two colours plus black instead of three, to give some of them an older feel,” Yu explains. “We’re thinking about the whole history of this collection, and making it look as authentic as possible in that regard.”
With 50 concepts nailed down, Yu, Perry and Suhrke realised a three-way split of the workload would still leave them stretched. So, a year ago, they welcomed two more developers to the team. Yu invited his friend, the designer and sprite artist Paul Hubans, to assist with level design. Ojiro Fumoto, creator of Downwell, came on board soon after, courtesy of Suhrke, who was responsible for
Downwell’s music and sound design. Fumoto is mostly working on the games allocated to Suhrke, while Hubans’ role involves fleshing out rough concepts from their nascent forms. “When they give me the games, they’ll have a screen or two that’s been built, and I have to go in and build the entire world,” he says. “So if it’s a platform game, for example, I have to think where the jumps should be, and how far apart things should be spaced. Level design is its own art, and it requires an extended level of attention that is really important.”
Both have also been given a game each to direct. Hubans admits he wishes he was in charge of more than one, but his horrorthemed point-and-click puzzle-adventure Night
Manor is close to his heart. “When I think of that era, those adventure games were some of my favourites. I was really inspired by them and I wanted to have something similar in this project and Derek agreed.” Meanwhile, as someone who grew up playing SNES games, Fumoto concedes that adapting to 8bit constraints has taken some time, as he takes
charge of Contra/OutRun hybrid Seaside
Drive. “I didn’t really have a strong grasp on what these retro games looked and played like,” he says. ”The other devs would warn me when I went too far – when I put in a fancy effect, too many enemies on screen or too many background details, they would tell me that it’s not really appropriate. So that in itself has been an interesting experience for me, to learn what the actual old games played or felt like.”
This isn’t simply nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. While the hope is that UFO 50 will evoke the feeling of retro games, there are a few old-fashioned ideas that won’t be present. Cheap deaths and clunky controls are out, in other words. “We definitely wanted contemporary game design to influence our games,” Yu says. “And we were happy to use modern concepts like random level generation, for example – it was fine for us if this company felt like it was ahead of its time.” These imaginary developers were not just progressive in design terms, either. Rescuing damsels in distress might have been a common narrative trope in the 1980s, but Yu and company are keen to steer clear of similarly retrograde ideas.
Currently, 35 of the 50 games are playable from start to finish; the team is hoping all 50 will be there or thereabouts by the year’s end. After which comes polish and refinement – and, in some cases, tweaks to make the ‘older’ games seem more primitive. The lore is taking a back seat for the time being, then, though it continues to evolve: we ask Yu for a list of directors for the games, and he initially agrees before deciding he’d rather preserve some of the mystique around this enigmatic studio he and his colleagues have conceived.
There’s still plenty of work to be done if it’s to hit its planned launch late next year, then, though so far it’s been a rather therapeutic process for its makers. “As a game designer, it’s normal to have a ton of ideas – like, way more than you can possibly make,” Perry says. “UFO 50 has allowed me and everyone else to do some house-cleaning of some of those ideas we’ve been idly thinking over, and finally put them into practice.”