The UFO 50 subreddit is beginning to role-play as if the fake in-game console was real

One thing I initially found off-putting about UFO 50 — Spelunky developer Mossmouth’s new release that’s actually a collection of 50 games that run on an imagined 1980s console called the LX — is that it doesn’t give you any context for the games, or the hardware, or the fictional developer UFO Soft. It’s just a grid of 50 games ordered by release date. I felt lost without the carefully laid-out breadcrumb trail of lore like that in Last Call BBS, a similar anthology of arcane puzzle games, or the elaborate frame story for earning and collecting the fictional vintage arcade cabinets in the management game Arcade Paradise.

But perhaps Mossmouth was wise in this decision — this is one of those situations when, if your game is engaging enough and you leave a blank space for the community, they’ll be more than happy to fill it in themselves. Over on the small but active UFO 50 subreddit, UFO 50 heads who’ve been soaking in all the rich interconnected details that Mossmouth packed into the games have naturally started to role-play a world in which the LX, and UFO Soft, are very much real.

It started on Wednesday with a simple thread prompt from redditor DorikoBac: “Can we do the thing people do when fictional history is made and pretend that the games from UFO 50 were our childhood games?” DorikoBac, too young to have owned an LX in the ’80s, imagined discovering UFO Soft via emulators in the mid-2010s.

A few people jumped into the replies with made-up stories of playing Bushido Ball at a Pizza Hut or watching an older brother binge on Warptank. One person posted a false memory of the way kids used to interact with the bafflingly hard games of the era: “When I was a kid playing grimstone, i used to be too scared to leave Pleasant village LOL. So instead of just not playing, i just walked around that tiny village just talking to the NPCs over and over hoping there was something else I could do.” (I was a kid in the ’80s, so I know just how true to life this is.)

Then, completely deadpan in-universe posts started to roll in. A user called FIST0 played on the deliberate anachronisms in UFO 50 — some of the games in the collection are retro-fied versions of more modern genres — by imagining what it would have been like to play Pilot Quest, an idle/clicker game, in a world before computers could run multiple apps at the same time. “Was it a far more punishing experience, or somehow more rewarding, knowing you earned your progression through playing the game? Or were people just cheesing the game back then by leaving the LX on in the background while using the TV to watching Stick Stickly on Nickelodeon or TMNT VHS’s?” When another user declared that the LX would use its internal clock to calculate the resources generated if you turned it off or played something else, others played along by pretending they’d been ignorant of this feature when they were kids — as so many players were back then, when games didn’t explain themselves well and if you lost the manual, you were on your own. The UFO 50 redditors are great at staying in character and bending mistakes or discrepancies back to the joke, making them another delightful part of the fiction.

UFO 50 redditors are even making it fun when people accidentally break the illusion. When someone talked about playing Party House at the same time as Pilot Quest, the OP replied: “Oh shit, you modded your LX with the dual cartridge switcher? I heard those things were like $1500 back then, and less than 100 people owned them.”

Another deeply in-fiction post from RT-55J credits Mossmouth (in its fictional role of discoverer and remasterer of the UFO Soft catalog) with fixing the high score tables that had been corrupted in emulated ROMs of LX games for years. “As you may recall there’s an infamously common dump of the Big Bell Race where all the saved times are 00:00.000 so they’re impossible to beat… I appreciate that Mossmouth went through the extra effort to find the original master disks or (in the couple cases where those weren’t available) sift through paper copies of the source code for the original values.”

Things are now getting even more elaborate, with one UFO 50 fan mocking up an ad for the LX in typical button-pushing 1980s/’90s style that “ran in the February 1986 issue of Women’s Hardware Monthly” (not a real magazine, sadly).

Look at that LX, what a beautiful machine! I remember when I saw one in a pawn shop in Canterbury, it must have been in around 1998, for £65. The case was cracked and it only had one working controller, but it came with the original manual and copies of Mortol 2 and Onion Delivery. And I didn’t buy it! I’ve regretted that ever since. Imagine how much it’d be worth now!