Unpacking the power of nostalgia, block by block
Sometimes – when you’ve just seen the third story within a week about a bunch of talented, hard-working game developers being laid off for no fault of their own, for example, or maybe you’ve accidentally broken a very important rule and allowed yourself to notice the honking opinions of some dickhead on the Internet – it’s a good idea to sit down and load up one of your old favourite videogames. Even if it’s something ostensibly as challenging as Dark Souls, spending some time with a game that has given you so much pleasure in the past can be just the balm required when everything else is feeling just a bit too much. The comfort found in familiarity is, after all, why we say that there is no place like home. It’s why proper relaxation involves a beloved album we’ve heard a thousand times rather than what Spotify’s algorithms think we might like, and why Netflix paid $100m for one-year rights to show its subscribers re-runs of Friends. And it’s why collections of pixels such as those on this issue’s cover have a special kind of resonance with people of a certain vintage.
If you grew up with games that were made out of discernible blocks not because of an artistic choice but because they couldn’t really be any other way, Derek Yu and his collaborators on UFO 50 have you in their sights. Which isn’t to say that this compilation of games created for a fictitious 1980s console platform excludes younger players, just that it won’t press quite the same buttons. Naturally, if the games are good enough, that shouldn’t matter at all. On p52, we catch up with the team behind this ridiculously ambitious project to discover how they’re finally approaching the finish line, some six years after UFO 50’s originally proposed launch.
Rounding out a retro theme, we also look at how one of the most storied names in videogames is bouncing back after too long in the wilderness. On p72, Atari CEO Wade Rosen tells us about what it means to sit atop a mountain of games that have given so much to so many people over the years, and what the company’s imposing legacy means for its future.