I think UFO50 shows how artistic intention works in games through genre within a relatively constricted form. The framing textually and metatextually ties games to individual creators’ personalities: the first game was made in free time outside of work, the collection found by a “team” in a garage. Outside of that, people getting the game generally have the context of like, oh I know Derek Yu’s Spelunky, or the guy who made Downwell worked on this!, etc. The devs have their own little pixely portraits in the credits, and obviously, the team was kept intentionally small.
The corollary to UFO50 being an exercise in curating taste is that it illustrates taste being exercised. If someone says “I don’t like platformers”, there are distinct authorial distinctions between Rakshaka/Barbuta/Mortol/Mooncat/Mini and Max that at least force that point into greater elaboration. It would be silly to say “I don’t like the Campanella games because I don’t like 1”, etc. If every game in UFO50 had a team of 20 or if there were 11 composers sharing duties for the collection, it wouldn’t necessarily be worse, but in communicating across groups it’s likely the approach to making a certain kind of mini genre game would end up more homogenous through shared assumptions.
Capcom, etc. collections present games as ‘products’ with scrawling concept art that they impulsively March of Progressed themselves out of, but also the packaging of stuff like the Digital Eclipse, etc. ones risks treating games as illustrative details within an epic youtube essay: 50 Years of Atari, The Jeff Minter Story. UFO50’s extratextual detail is present but restricted (short blurbs) and the more elaborate terminal stuff is puzzle gameplay which promises more fictional, rather than actual, details.
I’ve personally found UFO50 helpful as a reminder of the ways in which smaller groups can nimbly push depiction and to encourage others to try things that they may not have had language for before. Like I used Barbuta as a reference point to recommend La-Mulana to two friends. Obviously that’s anachronistic but its a lot easier than saying like, okay, download this emulator and launch Maze of Galious, now, some things are going to be confusing because you can’t distinguish between received design notions of the time, the restrictions of the console, and intentional confusion, but!
Rather, it’s like, here’s something short and recent that was made to illustrate an affection for a certain kind of design that’s fallen out of popular style. If you like it, or find the sense of humor funny, you will probably like this other thing made by people with a similar affinity, but different means.
