To beat Magic Garden, you can't ignore the cat. It's sleeping under the scoreboard in the midst of pixelated trees. Since touching the courtyard walls is a one-hit-kill, you might assume that everything outside the play area is useless. I did, anyway, until my seventh failed run.
Here's the trick: whenever you stash a pink blob in the safe zone, the cat begins to wake up. After six blobs are stashed, the cat will throw an invincibility potion into the courtyard — the potion I initially thought spawned randomly. Take the potion. The enemies should start flashing; it means they're vulnerable. You can now kill them just by running into them, like with power pellets in Pac-Man or super stars in Super Mario.
Magic Garden is one of the games included in UFO 50, a collection of 50 minigames that pastiche the design and aesthetic of 1980s arcade and console games. According to the in-game lore, it was developed in 1984 by Gerry Smolski for the LX-II gaming system. None of this is true, of course. UFO 50 was actually released in September 2024 by a six-person development team. It's part of a "retro revival," a term used to describe the spate of retro-influenced indie games that have cropped up on the independent game circuit. Many commonalities exist between these games: 16-bit graphics, chiptune music, brutal difficulty spikes and copious 1980s references. Some, like Celeste and Shovel Knight, remain cult classics within the indie game community. Others, like Balatro and Stardew Valley, have long since entered the video game mainstream.
So why are retro games cool again? How can they be popular with Generation Z gamers like myself, who came of age far after the mythologized '80s and '90s? In keeping with UFO 50's minigame format, I'll give you a series of vignettes detailing my experiences with the game.
One of the first games I played on UFO 50 was Ninpek, a Super Mario-adjacent adventure where you fight enemies as a shuriken-armed ninja. The game has charmingly bad graphics, to say the least. You fight dragons that conveniently hide their bodies in the water along the screen's southern perimeter, their necks looking like a cross between a sock puppet and a garden hose. Snails patrol platforms with lips half the size of their heads. There's this half-frog, half-spider creature that shoots missiles at the player. Its skin is shaded light blue, neither the color of frogs nor spiders.
Remember, this whole game was made by six people. I'm guessing the majority of this team was more versed in game design than artwork. Then again, this lack of professionalism was a cornerstone of early video games. Look at old Atari games or the first NES releases — amateurism runs deep in video game history.
This history stands in for the game's narrative, as each game in the collection has a "history" tab that details the fictional origins of the program. I discovered this halfway through my playthrough when I accidentally selected it instead of starting another round of Ninpek. The descriptions begin with the game's release year, which ranges from 1982 to 1989. From there, you get a backstory of that minigame's creation, often laden with retro game references. For example, each game was developed for iterations of the "LX Computer System," a likely reference to the MSX computer line that kickstarted Japan's video game industry during (when else?) the '80s. There are tales of overworked developers coding entire games in two weeks, a figure not far off from Atari's notorious six-week development cycle. UFO 50 doesn't just preserve retro games' graphics, it maintains their frantic culture. It retells the history of video games through these mini-histories — part love letter, part parody.
But this retro-centric design preserves a lot of the more frustrating aspects of old school video games, the most obvious one being the difficulty.
UFO 50 is a very, very hard game. The platformers require intense multitasking — running, shooting, jumping and dodging all at once, all of the time. The puzzle games demand near-perfection in order to complete them; one misplaced bomb in Devilition can ruin your run. Many times, the game flat-out won't tell you what to do. Think back to Magic Garden: all you get before you start is a list of controls. It's up to you to figure out how the game actually works.
I can easily see an avid retro gamer picking up UFO 50 and loving the game's ambiguities. I can just as easily see someone new to retro-style games being confused by its lack of instructions and frustrated by its difficulty. This has been a critique of the retro revival since its foundation: it only caters to video games' most hardcore demographic. Retro revival games assume that everyone feels nostalgic for the digital glory days. If you're not, can they still be fun to play?
Everyone has a different relationship to retro gaming. Some may love the old stuff, but others don't care. I won't make any claims about whether you'll like retro revival games, but I know that I do--how about I tell you why?
I started playing retro games in high school, largely because I wanted to be "not like the other gamers." Feel free to laugh at me. I got a SNES Classic Edition for my birthday and decided to make my way through the lesser-known Nintendo catalog. I played Star Fox. I played F-Zero. I played enough of those old games that I got another mini-console, the Sega Genesis Mini. Then came Castlevania: Bloodlines and Streets of Rage 2. Eventually, I started reading Wikipedia articles on the games I loved. I learned the developers' names. I memorized release years. All the while, I spent my evenings slowly progressing towards Dracula's Castle, Planet Venom, whatever screen I needed to reach. Night came. Crickets would start chirping.
Then there was college, and trust me, I still played, but late-night gaming sessions aren't as feasible when taking 15 credit hours. My time spent playing continued to drop year after year. I read more. I wrote more. Then, last week, I booted up UFO 50 for the first time.
The opening screen shows a pixelated LX computer, unattended controllers lying by its sides.
Vaguely familiar chiptune music starts in the background. The bottom of the screen reads "Play Forever."
It's getting dark outside. I close the blinds.
I pick up my controller. I hit "start."
