When Derek Yu, the creator of Cavernouscollaborated with a team of brilliant designers to release a collection of 50 games (yes, 50 video games!) I assumed I knew the outcome: I would lose my job, fail as a father, and be discovered years later in an abandoned cabin in the woods, hiding in my dirt and muttering, “You can’t take me! I have four more games to play!”
And yet here I am, just a day later UFO-50‘s release, reading about this huge collection of video games instead of playing them. Is this self-preservation? Personal growth? Of course not.
After hours of frantically jumping from one game to another, I accepted that one person was not, no, shouldn’t responsible for appreciating this gigantic masterpiece. Instead, appreciation of UFO-50 is a team sport. And the UFO-50 subreddit is his field.
Like this year Animal source and Yu’s previous Cavernous games, the collection is full of codes yet to be cracked and treasures yet to be discovered. In addition to 50 games, UFO 50 includes a backstory of a fictional developer, UFO Soft, and a terminal where players can enter code. How these two facts relate to each other, the subreddit hopes to decipher.
In a recent episode of Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console PodcastYu spoke at length about the magic of mystery – how neither The Legend of Zelda yet Dark Souls came up with easy answers, with both games inviting players to explore and map their worlds. Now, Yu, along with his childhood friend and fellow designer Jon Perry (and a slew of other creatives), have passed that experience on to another generation, one that isn’t solving video game riddles at home, but on a massive social platform.
I am grateful for this subreddit community that saved me from going out into the wilderness alone. I will keep my job. I will fulfill my aspirations as a loving parent. And I mean, like I should, I will do a disgusting amount of UFO-50‘s inactive game Pilot search —all while reading the threads on the subreddit, where thousands of other fans are working together to turn 50 games into one cohesive adventure.