UFO 50 and the Misconception of "Game Over"

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 retro-style video game from Derek Yu’s¹ Mossmouth, and I have been completely engrossed in it since I bought it. I have a lot of thoughts about the games in this collection, but for today’s post I wanted to discuss one particular overarching theme present in nearly every game in the collection.

When discussing retro video games, a common theme is that they are “brutally” or “punishingly” difficult. Often, video games of the late 80s (which is what UFO 50’s games hearken back to) would leave little room for error. This idea of challenge even informs contemporary titles such as Dark Souls and other games directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, which are known for obtuse game mechanics or controls which often frustrate the player when trying to overcome an obstacle.

In classic games, just one or two bad moves would cost the player one of their retries, and after exhausting all of them the player would be booted back to the title screen and need to start over again. The folklore surrounding these design patterns is that publishers wanted players to spend their their quarters at arcades to retry games again and again. The story goes that when games made their way to home consoles, publishers mandated difficulty in order to extend the time until players gained the skill to win each game. This move supposedly countered the resale market which video game publishers could not profit from by “artificially” lengthening the time until a player exhausted a game.

I utterly reject this framing.

UFO 50 is a self-published collection of games by 6 designers. There was no publisher to demand extra difficulty from the games. I paid less than CA$50 for a digital license to this collection. Not only did I pay less than a dollar per game in the collection, I can’t even resell the collection once I finish each game.

I wouldn’t even want to sell my copy of UFO 50 once finished.

The idea of a video game’s difficulty being “brutal” or “punishing” implies a level of sadism from that game’s developers. The uncritical parroting of this adjective suggests that this kind of cruelty is a normal thing for a developer to inflict onto players, as if video games aren’t supposed to be enjoyed. It also ignores the many benefits of ending and restarting the game, for players.

Let’s leave the realm of UFO 50 for a moment and consider a game that readers are in all likelihood familiar with: 1985’s Super Mario Bros. A new player would likely run headfirst into the game’s first Goomba enemy and need to retry the level again. What kind of pain is inflicted onto the player when this happens? None. Simply try again. Even an unsavvy player would know that there should be a way to overcome this obstacle, and will begin to experiment with the controller. Randomly hitting one of the two buttons on the controller reveals that the button labeled “A” causes Mario to jump, allowing the player to “ascend” over the Goomba enemy and move on. Then come some pipes to jump over, each higher than the last with more Goombas in between them, some of which the player may inadvertently run into. No harm in fumbling this early on. At most, it takes less than a minute to reach this point in the level if restarting. Same with falling into the first pit, or to any other obstacle present in this opening stage. Fail fast, iterate often.

Failing fast at a task allows one to learn quickly which moves are a mistake, and which ones lead to success. It can be frustrating, one’s forward progress literally frustrated by elements of the game, but the result is a perfect formula for learning. Like a training session, the early phase of a game demands repetition. To consistently move onto the next stage, the player needs to pull off all the right moves, again and again.

If a player fails one of Super Mario Bros.' later levels and runs out of retries, they are sent back to the title screen and need to start again from the first level if they want to continue playing. Most discourse on video game difficulty frames this as a kind of punishment; The thought is that by taking away all of a player’s forward progress, the game has punished the player for their mistakes. To this, I ask: Have gamers lost the plot?

To frame a “Game Over” in this light presumes that players could not possibly get any enjoyment out of replaying parts of a game which are easier, which they have already mastered. As if SMB’s World 1-1 loses all of its fun, all of its charm, all of its challenge, once the player has won it for the first time. This “punishment” framing ignores the genuine benefits of sending a player back: By asking the player to go again through an easier part of the game, it reminds them that they can in fact overcome the game’s later challenges. By sending the player back, the game eases the pressure put on the player to perform well. A player can breeze through easier segments before making their way through to later parts of the game. As if that wasn’t enough, savvy players could even use this opportunity to stock up on extra retries from the many 1-Up Mushrooms hidden in the game’s levels, giving them more chances to fail at the game’s later sections. Finally, a player can still challenge themselves through easy sections by trying to complete it as fast as possible, or by searching for secrets which may provide boons to help them later in their run through the game.

What baffles me about UFO 50 is that nearly every game feels explicitly designed with this idea in mind. Every game in the collection puts forward a tough challenge right out the gate, but each one also makes it effortless to try again. With just about every new game I would try, I would quickly die a dozen times until I had gotten used to how the game plays, and then would slowly improve until I could make my way into later levels. Best of all, most games in UFO 50 are short once you can consistently finish them, many taking less than 30 minutes for a skilled player to finish. Because of the short play times, it’s very fun to aim for personal best high scores or speed run times. Even in those where I’m less interested in high scores, the games are still fun and the prospect of replaying them is very enticing. Yet, I’ve only actually reached the end of 10 of the 50 games in UFO 50. Even for those players who view games as one-and-done experiences, this collection provides such incredible value.

I’ll have more to say about UFO 50 at some point; This game is giving me a lot to think about.