What's Small, Yellow, and Buzzy?
May 23, 2019 2:28 AM   Subscribe

Panic have announced a cute new handheld console, Playdate. Costing $149, it will come with a season of twelve brand new games launched weekly from developers like Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy), Bennett Foddy (QWOP), and Zach Gage (Really Bad Chess). The Playdate has an unusual design including a rotating crank controller, and is accompanied by a Mac SDK that works in Lua and C.
posted by adrianhon (84 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
I saw it, got excited, then saw: "In which countries will Playdate be available? We’re still figuring this out." and was a bit less excited.
posted by frimble at 2:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


Burying the lede: The console was designed by Teenage Engineering. So even the hardware will be cool.
posted by ardgedee at 2:58 AM on May 23, 2019 [20 favorites]


It looks like the love child of a GameBoy and an OP-1.
posted by acb at 3:00 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


I love that the crank is part of the interface and not a charger. Goofy and novel.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:00 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


> I saw it, got excited, then saw: "In which countries will Playdate be available? We’re still figuring this out." and was a bit less excited.

That and "Stock will be very limited. Sign up early" makes me worry that so few of them will ship that the majority will be hoarded by collectors who will never play them for fear of harming their resale value.
posted by ardgedee at 3:03 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


I love that the crank is part of the interface and not a charger. Goofy and novel.

That's probably from Teenage Engineering, whose OP-1 synth offers a crank interface for recording.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:24 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


I saw this and thought 'What if you're left-handed?' But I'm not a gamer so I guess gaming is ambidextrous anyway? That you're always doing something with your 'off' hand? As a lefty, I can't imagine cranking with my right hand being easy or fun.
posted by penguin pie at 4:18 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


I'm a lefty and play a fair whack of games, and I don't immediately feel that it'd be a barrier - you're usually doing fairly dextrous things with both hands, I don't think I've ever seen left handed controllers?
posted by ominous_paws at 4:32 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I've got a bunch of Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators. They're weird, baroque little toys and I have hope that this doohickie, if it ships, will be fun stuff.
posted by 1adam12 at 4:43 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


Here for this.

I think this fills a small gap with gaming. It hits on nostalgia for people who had a Game Boy or similar. It doesn't require investing in A Platform and IAPs and loot boxes and $60 games. It's very simple. It's casual. It is adorable and I love the crank (it is juuuust silly enough.)

Even if it has a limited shelf life, which it might, looking at it in a purely logical way, $12.50 per game isn't bad. As they themselves say, it's not expensive and it's also not cheap. It looks like it's coming from a place that's just straight-up fun, and I applaud that. Absolutely concerned about e-waste and recycling, though.

(I made the error of browsing a Mac news site about it and reading the comments, which were all missing the point – or questioning the point. My favorite was "But everyone has a smartphone!" and... yeah.)
posted by hijinx at 5:03 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


Somehow I totally missed that Panic was behind the goose game as well.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:11 AM on May 23, 2019


Panic isn’t behind Untitled Goose Game; they’re just publishing it
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:20 AM on May 23, 2019


Also I am SO going to try to preorder one of these, even if I have to have it sent to my parents in America
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:21 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm hoping that TE's involvement means that it will be possible to get one in Sweden without being slugged for import duties (and the obligatory processing fees) by the nation's notoriously aggressive privatised postal monopoly.
posted by acb at 5:31 AM on May 23, 2019


As they themselves say, it's not expensive and it's also not cheap.

While I think the price point is fine, I feel like it's actually expensive in the "will you actually get one and when" sense. The comment above about collectors locking them up rings true to me, to say nothing of the resellers that swarm like locusts over every niche gaming release. I remember the One Laptop Per Child rollout and that was a stressful mix of hope, hype, and hassle.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:33 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


John Gruber: The story is about Playdate, the most amazing and exciting product announcement, for me, since the original iPhone.

I think this captures it well enough: it's cute and for techy 30-40 year-olds who don't care too much about spending $150, in return for an evocation of a certain point in time. Gruber is very much the target audience for this.
posted by bonehead at 5:35 AM on May 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


wenestvedt: "I love that the crank is part of the interface and not a charger. Goofy and novel."

I had the opposite reaction... why wouldn't it *also* be a charger?? Could take this thing straight through the apocalypse if it was!
posted by Grither at 5:37 AM on May 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


If the crank is expected to be used with the dominant hand, I wonder what the best way of making the platform suitable for both left- and right-handed people would be. The only easy one I can think of would be to have a left-handed variant with the crank on the left. Another option would be to have two sets of controls, above and below the screen, and use accelerometers to tell which way it's up. Which would make it bulkier, though could also allow for two-player gaming à la cocktail arcade machines. Or one could have two cranks.
posted by acb at 5:38 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: One could have two cranks.
posted by amanda at 5:44 AM on May 23, 2019 [24 favorites]


Is it entirely necessary for robots to be gendered, and if they must be gendered, must they always be heteronormatively so? Could we not use the crank to select among, like, at least three possible pseudo-genders for the protagonist and love interest in the game?

I mean, it's cute, but if they're going to push the bounds of tradition with the hardware MAYBE THE GAMES COULD ALSO DO?

This is my gay agenda: no cops at pride, just non-binary robots smashing each other with love.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:48 AM on May 23, 2019 [12 favorites]


I have several bits of TE gear. Their instruments feel like they’ve been shipped directly from the better timeline. It’s like a nostalgia for the present. The PO-1 has a little helicopter game which is not fun and infuriating. Also, arguably making music on the device is a game in itself.

Is this pushing the bounds of tradition? Or is it a Game Boy with a crank? Answering this may require $150 and a lot of waiting.
posted by q*ben at 6:08 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


... that was supposed to be “fun but infuriating” above.

My favorite bit of the design is that the games appear on the device one a week for 12 weeks. I am hopeful given TE’s history that they will open source game development at some point. The community built around their equipment is amazing.
posted by q*ben at 6:12 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I'm so not the target audience for this, it's just another limited use toy that'll gather dust in a couple of weeks for me and I already have a Switch to do that.

Mostly the hype about it just annoys me because it's so over the top.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:24 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


if it has an SDK, that suggests you will be able to push your own code to it. I hope they don't make that process arduous and closed or tied to mac only.

I also am extremely skeptical of the lack of a handhold below the buttons, but I guess I could always tape it to a chunk of wood or something.
posted by jonbro at 6:27 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


So yeah, hardware with Teenage Engineering's involvement? They're going to make like 10 and it will be on perpetual backorder.

And yeah, there's a bunch of new multi-rom emulating pocket-sized gaming devices (ahem) lately that have ergonomics that make my middle-aged hands ache just looking at them. So it's sort of a blessing that most of them are sorta lousy at what they do.
posted by Kyol at 6:34 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Man, Teenage Engineering love cranks. I'm wondering if it'll become like the 3D feature on the 3DS - novel and interesting but eventually abandoned.

I got to play with an OP-1 a little while ago and the interface was so charming that I'm really looking forward to see what they can do with this. It would be pretty cool to have a handheld that has a defined, limited aesthetic (like the original Game Boy) made by people with an awareness of how and why to do that in an era where just a regular display would be easily available.
posted by griphus at 6:39 AM on May 23, 2019


Mac SDK because of course it is.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:58 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I love anything out of the box so i'm all here for this. I'm p sick of all the infinite ways society is set up and I think this is fun.
posted by FirstMateKate at 7:01 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Though hopefully the toolchain is LLVM-based, meaning that you can swap the C compiler for something more modern like Swift or Rust.
posted by acb at 7:03 AM on May 23, 2019


I wonder what the best way of making the platform suitable for both left- and right-handed people would be

Turn it upside down, detect that and invert the screen? Wouldn't really need two sets of controls, if the off-to-the-side button positioning allows them to be pressed without blocking the screen.
posted by davejay at 7:07 AM on May 23, 2019


Oh man, I love Teenage Engineering's stuff. The Pocket Operators are super neat, although I don't own one because I don't have nearly the talent to make anything listenable with one. But even still, I've been tempted more than once. Except that would make me the guy who just owns one as a curiosity object and I feel like they should really be owned by people who are going to make cool stuff with them.

TE's products strike me as basically what you'd get if you took 1980s hardware design philosophy—button and rotary-encoder interfaces, segmented LCD displays, "do one thing and do it well", no touchscreen shit—but put the full capabilities of modern silicon behind it. E.g. the Pocket Operators have something like 2 minutes of sample memory (at I assume a modern sample rate like 44.1kHz 16b at least or maybe 48kHz), which is absurdly long for a traditional sampler. And I'm told they'll also do a clicktrack sync over the analog outputs, almost like jamlocking video gear, which is really clever, and not the easy-way-out solution that I would have expected (which would be a separate clock line, or MIDI, or just putting USB ports on everything and then having some contract software shop in India cook up some crappy Windows utility to try and manage everything).

It's kinda refreshing just from an engineering/design perspective, and also a reminder that while the world has been sliding towards greasy-fingerprinted touchscreens everywhere (and more often than not just burying an off-the-shelf iPad or phone or computer monitor inside a bezel) you can do some really amazing stuff if you're willing to actually design hardware and spin a board. It's not like the silicon companies have exactly been sitting still for the last 20 years, but there aren't a ton of companies taking advantage of it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:09 AM on May 23, 2019 [13 favorites]


Excited. 🗜️🕹️🎮
posted by Fizz at 7:17 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


which is really clever, and not the easy-way-out solution that I would have expected

A lot of Korg gear does this as well. Their Volca line of affordable ($100-$200) hardware synths is all click sync and Korg even has an iOS app for click sync so you don’t have to daisy chain five different synths. It’s really useful for getting the pocket operators to play nice with the Volcas because the Pocket Operators occasionally bleed the click track into the audio track even when they’re set not to. A really fun thing to do is use a modular synth (I have a Bastl Kastle stand-alone that runs on batteries or I believe USB) to send out weirdly modulated click tracks to the synths to make them do weird but rhythmic tempo shifts they synth isn’t able to do natively.
posted by griphus at 7:18 AM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


The URL https://play.date/ is blocked by our corporate webnanny. I assume that they think it's something other than a game site.
posted by octothorpe at 7:20 AM on May 23, 2019


It hits on nostalgia for people who had a Game Boy or similar.

I've always gotten a massive Game-and-Watch vibe out of the Teenage Engineering work, especially the Pocket Operators. Hell, those are pretty much direct descendents. One of the Playdate screen shots even has a little segmented G&W dude standing there.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:29 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah some administrators think it's a good idea to block all "unusual" TLDs, for various specious reasons. This is dumb and bad. You can sometimes get around it with Google Cache, although the GC version of their site isn't loading for me.

They also have an official Twitter account with some of the same information that's on the site.

griphus: Interesting about the Korg synths, I didn't know they did that as well. Neat. (It's admittedly been a long time since I've played with that stuff, though. I had the really cool opportunity to take a computer-based music class in the mid 90s, using mostly late 80s and early 90s gear, and loved it despite realizing I am rubbish at actually making music and my greatest artistic contribution was debugging MIDI chain issues. In retrospect I had no idea how uncommon it was to get to play with that gear at that time.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:33 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


This is awesome. I absolutely signed up for the notification list, and I will absolutely buy one day of release.
posted by uberchet at 7:34 AM on May 23, 2019


That's probably from Teenage Engineering, whose OP-1 synth offers a crank interface for recording.

More "definitely" than "probably":
By the way, the crank came from our friends at Teenage Engineering. They were our partners for Playdate’s design. Isn’t it nice?
posted by wildblueyonder at 7:39 AM on May 23, 2019


Someone over on HN mentioned that TE has also done engineering work for IKEA. Would anyone know what those products might be?
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:46 AM on May 23, 2019


This is definitely a cool-looking device although the whole quantities-are-limited-preorder-now thing is kind of offputting. I'll buy one when they've been out for a while to good reviews and supplies are plentiful.

That being said, I did recently spring for a ClockworkPi GameShell, which is a similar sort of gadget, albeit Linux-based with an emphasis on emulation. I haven't really done much with it (I have a vague idea of porting my current Roguelike project to it) and the dev resources seem a bit lacking but it's open-source, portable and battery-powered. (It runs Pico-8 so an Ennuigi port should be viable.)
posted by suetanvil at 8:00 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


Someone over on HN mentioned that TE has also done engineering work for IKEA. Would anyone know what those products might be?

IKEA's new smart speakers, IIRC.
posted by acb at 8:00 AM on May 23, 2019


Also, if you're in downtown Stockholm, Teenage Engineering built the mechanical display wall in the boutique hotel at the Gallerian shopping centre. It's a wall-sized split-flap display, like the old airport departure boards, only each flap is either black or white, and it acts like a slow, noisy monochrome bitmap display, showing animations and/or processed images of whoever's standing in front of it.
posted by acb at 8:03 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I have a GameShell as well. Nicely designed, though let down a bit by the insistence of everything being modular and standard, and thus the battery space being taken up by a plastic shell containing a standard Nokia featurephone battery, which lasts for next to no time. The range anxiety does put a damper on the pick-up-and-go qualities of it.
posted by acb at 8:06 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Mac SDK because of course it is.

Panic makes Mac/iOS software.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:26 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


> Mac SDK because of course it is.

I assume the SDK will be built out of their web IDE Coda, so promising Windows and Linux ports wasn't in the cards anyway.
posted by ardgedee at 8:31 AM on May 23, 2019


So yeah, hardware with Teenage Engineering's involvement? They're going to make like 10 and it will be on perpetual backorder.

And yeah, there's a bunch of new multi-rom emulating pocket-sized gaming devices (ahem) lately that have ergonomics that make my middle-aged hands ache just looking at them. So it's sort of a blessing that most of them are sorta lousy at what they do.



This is just about right, unfortunately.

I like what Teenage Engineering is doing, and I've had my hands on a few different products from their line and I'm more and more of the opinion that mainly really cool electronics-as-pop art objects.

I haven't played with an OP-1 but the other stuff I've played with is just... I don't know, kitschy and lo-fi? The interfaces are weird and quirky, the sounds are gimmicky and crunchy and lo-fi and not in a way I've found acoustically interesting or useful, or simply playing well with other synths. The quirky interfaces don't give a whole lot of good performance surface options in my experience. (The OP-1 is apparently a pretty fun portable workstation though.)

Most of their stuff is crazy expensive and limited quantity, too, and for the prices it makes a lot more sense to get something like the newer Novation SuperNovas or even the Korg Microfreq - or even a vintage synth. There's a ton of Junos and Jupiters and stuff out there still.

Anyway, this is just a weird synth nerd derail. I'm not actually hating on what they're doing or how people are into them as art objects and cool sound toys, but as performance instruments they're a bit over rated. There seems to be a bit of artistic snake oil and hype, to be honest.

And I'd much rather people be into collecting quirky, weird synths as art objects than guns or something.

I just want to differentiate between this cool art object part and the hype because I've seen a couple of friends buy some of the Teenage Engineering stuff to use as serious performance or studio toys and... have been a little disappointed. Unless you're mainly into it for the art object collector side of it, you're better off buying less quirky, less expensive and more flexible synths and sound toys.

A lot of people might not realize this but a good synth really is an entire band in a box in the right hands. With a good synth backed with a MIDI controller or interface, a free or cheap DAW or MIDI sequencer/recorder, and a way to record/multitrack audio is all you actually need to make studio electronic music, because a synth can also make drum sounds, be the bassline, do leads and pads and more, either one track at a time or even with multi-voice MIDI programming for live work. On higher end synths you can do multi-voice polyphony where it can readily make both drum machine noises and synth lead noises at the same time with different patches being cleverly loaded in time with MIDI SysEx commands.

The only real reason to buy a bunch of different devices is if you just really want a bunch of different independent devices and interfaces, IE for much more live/improv stuff.
posted by loquacious at 9:15 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


Good luck to them, but this is definitely not the best year to announce yet another gaming subscription service.
posted by sideshow at 9:16 AM on May 23, 2019


Panic used to design a great line of Katamari t-shirts.

Here's a fun narrative about what was like to go up against Steve Jobs and iTunes.
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:39 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh! I remember those little sound-generating toys: I thought they looked like so much fun, but then I saw the price tag and had a sad.

I would love to try one out someday, but I don't have $89+shipping to throw at a novelty, much less $1200 for that synth (which, when I saw it, I thought was a Raspberry Pi HAT)!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:42 AM on May 23, 2019


I haven't played with an OP-1 but the other stuff I've played with is just... I don't know, kitschy and lo-fi? The interfaces are weird and quirky, the sounds are gimmicky and crunchy and lo-fi

It's an attempt to represent authenticity or realness through an intentional degradation of capability from a platonic ideal, offset with whimsy. The shape is a perfect slab, interrupted with a crank.

Not to be a hater---it is an artistic choice after all---but, like a Wes Anderson movie, some will love it, while many may not find it to their taste. In my view, this is emphatically not for me, though I can certainly appreciate that it may be a perfect madeleine for others.
posted by bonehead at 9:48 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Hope I got on the email list soon enough to have a fighting chance at buying one. Devices like this are such a homerun for me, I am exactly their target demo - not just in wanting to own one and play it, but also wanting so badly to have helped design something like this.

It's just very inspiring, and I'd never seen Teenage Engineering's work before and that's double-inspiring. Getting into hardware is kind of the final design frontier for me, I love games but they weren't paying the bills (or helping my mental health), and honestly I'm tired of building interfaces I can't feel with my hands. This device gives me so many ideas!
posted by Snacks at 10:29 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty here for this, but I've just been fascinated by the decision to do use black and white screen. It's such an intentional choice in 2019, part oblique strategies "add a constraint" and part "we're not even pretending that this isn't pure nostalgia." They're right that modern reflective black and white screens like these are beautiful, and I'm excited for it, but it's just very...I think "Gruber is very much the target audience for this" really sums it up.
posted by zachlipton at 10:52 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Given the supply problems that TE has with its synths and minisynths, and the risk in making things on a scale where it could be an expensive, bankruptcy-inducing failure, perhaps constraining the design to fulfill a niche market isn't the worst choice.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:02 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Since Panic is touting this as their product rather than a Teenage Engineering product (TE is credited only as as "Partners for Playdate's design"), I'm inclined to assume it's not going to be subject to TE's reputation for delivering on promises.
posted by ardgedee at 11:17 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


can i play the goose game with the crank
posted by poffin boffin at 11:21 AM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


Can someone confirm what happens to content if you stop paying for "seasons?"

Please tell me the stuff you already bought remains yours to play. Otherwise it's a brick?
posted by rokusan at 12:21 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I’d be astonished if the games went away. Panic haven’t talked about subscriptions. I imagine you pay for, and keep, individual seasons, with the first season being included with the initial purchase.

I realise a lot of people won’t know Panic, but they’ve been a fantastic Mac developer for 20 years and in my experience they’ve always treated their customers very fairly.
posted by adrianhon at 12:55 PM on May 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


In Firewatch, which is a game where you are a forest ranger, you can pick up a disposable camera. You get 10 (i think) shots you can take of anything in the game, scenery, whatever. It's really a gorgeous game. There's a completely gratuitous feature where you can pay $15 and the a human being at Panic's offices will print out your photos on glossy photo paper with an authentic curl on it and mail them to you in an envelope just like the photo processing company in the game. I mean, $15 is chump change for this, they're not making much money on it. It was just an awesome thing to do, a feature that not very many people would use, but added to the atmosphere. Sadly, on checking just now, they just discontinued the service it this past Monday of all times.

What I'm saying is that Panic are good people.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:12 PM on May 23, 2019 [12 favorites]


Another fun thing Panic did was put a lighted logo on the building and created an app to let anyone change the colors at night. Completely gratuitous, but captures the imagination.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:31 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I think this captures it well enough: it's cute and for techy 30-40 year-olds who don't care too much about spending $150, in return for an evocation of a certain point in time. Gruber is very much the target audience for this.

This may be the shiny glow of memory, but part of the pleasure of the game boy was that lots of people had one and it was vaguely social. This seems cool and the demographic note is right, but it also feels like you are very obviously buying something that won't be mass market. That isn't bad, but it's very different - a novelty, not a game changer.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:40 PM on May 23, 2019


Jason Scott asked about archiving:
I have been thinking of Jason Scott from day one! Games will always be side-loadable, and we will make sure to release our SDK and simulator publicly, AND, we will make sure you get the season one games just in case everything goes sideways… 😅
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:58 PM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


I realise a lot of people won’t know Panic, but they’ve been a fantastic Mac developer for 20 years and in my experience they’ve always treated their customers very fairly.

Every interaction I've had with Panic for support for Coda and Transmit has been pleasant and professional. I have also had no problems reusing serial numbers when replacing my work Mac and adding a second Mac for home use. I'd be very surprised if they went to a business model that would be a negative or exploitative experience for customers. They are a business and have culled software when it makes sense to do so, but I don't get the sense that money is their primary motivation for making things.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:15 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


I haven't played with an OP-1 but the other stuff I've played with is just... I don't know, kitschy and lo-fi? The interfaces are weird and quirky, the sounds are gimmicky and crunchy and lo-fi and not in a way I've found acoustically interesting or useful, or simply playing well with other synths. The quirky interfaces don't give a whole lot of good performance surface options in my experience. (The OP-1 is apparently a pretty fun portable workstation though.)

I have an OP-1 and the sound engine in it is nothing to write home about; most people who use it as a sound generator load it up with samples, from what I gather. (Though it's rumoured that the upcoming OS upgrade will have a plug-in architecture, allowing third parties who know software synthesis to write their own engines.)

I can imagine engineers from Roland, Native Instruments and such having a good laugh at Teenage Engineering's music devices. To be fair, they're mostly an industrial design house, and actually making things that make sound is an afterthought.
posted by acb at 2:45 PM on May 23, 2019


I can think of so many underrepresented simulation genres that could use the crank. Pencil-sharpening. Sausage grinding. Earwax cleaning. Raising and lowering a drawbridge, or a tiny middle finger.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:06 PM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


RVP: if you've never played WarioWare, you need to.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 3:17 PM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I have had the pleasure of visiting Panic's offices during rare open houses, and not only do they have video game iconography on the walls, there is a secret founder's room that is really cool.

Panic are good folx and I am very excited for them and Playdate.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 3:49 PM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


Every time I'm standing in front of Powell's or in the vicinity with someone I always show them the trick of changing the colors of the Panic sign. It's such a cool, quirky thing.

I'm not the target demographic for this, but I've used Transmit for years. I recently played Firewatch too and didn't realize until the end credits that it was by Panic. Such a cool company - I wish they were hiring.
posted by bendy at 4:23 PM on May 23, 2019


I can think of so many underrepresented simulation genres that could use the crank. Pencil-sharpening. Sausage grinding. Earwax cleaning.

A faux-mechanical version of Pong/Breakout, that looks/sounds as if your paddle and the ball are pieces of plastic inside the machine, moved by arrangements of gears and belts.

Alternatively, the sorts of joystick-breaking athletics-themed games they had for 8-bit computers; you know, where the faster you waggle the joystick between left and right, the faster your runner runs.
posted by acb at 4:42 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I signed up to the mailing list because it costs me nothing, but put me down as skeptical. Hilariously, Gruber thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread has made me LESS interested. Like, what's actually exciting about it? It seems like a neat little computer art project, sure, and given how bloody expensive the OP-1 is, it's kind of neat to get something made by Teenage Engineering for $150 USD. But it's twelve games of unknown length or quality, and sure they happen to be made by some neat names like Keita Takahashi and Bennett Foddy, but there's nothing that really makes me think this will be much more than a well-engineered toy.

That's not to say that people won't like it, or should feel bad for liking it. "Maybe not for me" is definitely not the same as "terrible thing that shouldn't exist." Panic basically says they made the thing they wanted to make, and for that reason alone it'll be neat.

Also: I still haven't opened my package of Firewatch photos. I don't know why, but I can't bring myself to break the seal.
posted by chrominance at 4:59 PM on May 23, 2019


there's nothing that really makes me think this will be much more than a well-engineered toy.
it's a video game thing

that's literally the point, for it to be a well-engineered toy
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:03 PM on May 23, 2019 [16 favorites]


Is TE stuff really outrageously overpriced? I think a lot of the $$$ is from pure scarcity. The original POs were like 60 bucks and even the OP-1 retails for less than $1000 which puts it in the same ballpark as korg’s classic reissues, smaller Novation equipment etc- definitely not a bargain but midrange in the world of keyboards. I’m an amateur who has owned and sold a lot of instruments over the years and their stuff is barely offensive on the overpriced-musical-equipment scale. Yeah it’s noisy and uses mini jacks. It’s also super fun and has no direct equivalent in the market. I don’t get the hate.

yes I did own a lomo in the 90s why do you ask?
posted by q*ben at 5:20 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


A faux-mechanical version of Pong/Breakout, that looks/sounds as if your paddle and the ball are pieces of plastic inside the machine

There's a new arcade near me that has one of these – that is, a physical Pong machine where the paddle and ball are chunky plastic. I think it's this one. Very fun to watch!
posted by oulipian at 5:58 PM on May 23, 2019


that's literally the point, for it to be a well-engineered toy

Kind of shows you how far all of this has come, right? Grownups wreck everything.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:33 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


i think people are missing the point that gruber is so excited about this mostly because it's literally being made by his friends:

You know that scene in GoodFellas where Tommy is about to be made, and Jimmy and Henry can’t contain their excitement because it’s as close as they themselves will ever get to being made? That’s a bit how I feel about Playdate — I have so many friends at Panic, and this feels as close as I’ll ever get to the makers of a hardware platform. (Let’s please ignore the fact that everything goes to shit in GoodFellas at that point.)
posted by JimBennett at 9:34 PM on May 23, 2019 [4 favorites]


a ClockworkPi GameShell, …(I have a vague idea of porting my current Roguelike project to it)

That's going to be difficult on that handheld's 320×240 screen. I would have thought that people would have learned from the PocketC.H.I.P.'s dire screen, but no.
posted by scruss at 5:09 AM on May 24, 2019


Looking forward to the official Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt game "Crank You For Being a Crank".
posted by Gortuk at 7:29 AM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


The GameShell's screen is a module attached to the logic board on a ribbon cable. Assuming that the GPU and the connection bandwidth are sufficient, it should be theoretically possible to upgrade these to a higher resolution screen at some future point. (Which would be my main wish for the device, along with a battery that takes up all space available to it.)
posted by acb at 8:04 AM on May 24, 2019


That's going to be difficult on that handheld's 320×240 screen.

The game (here, self-link) is a variant of ULarn, a game that was successfully ported to the Palm in the early nineties. I played that version incessantly on a tiny screen and it was perfectly playable. The Palm port showed a scrolling subset of the map, which is how you got reasonably-sized characters but the game was still fun.

The project is non-trivial (and I'm nowhere near ready to start) but I think that problem is solvable.
posted by suetanvil at 8:04 AM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


This got me thinking about the QCX radio kit. If you have the appropriate amateur radio license, this can get you talking to people thousands of miles away using Morse code for less than $100. The creator is working on a new kit that will support voice communication (single sideband for my fellow radionerds). But, for a low-power radio like these, Morse code will carry a lot better than voice.
posted by exogenous at 8:31 AM on May 24, 2019


Oy. This is unfortunately laser targeted towards me, as someone who has used a lot of panic software, as someone who has a lot of TE devices and loves them, as someone who loves niche video games, and as someone who goes nuts when presented with the word Katamari.

I have some TE stuff already... While I love them, they aren't without their annoyances, and they are incredibly polarizing devices. They tend to get derided as toys, but most of them are surprisingly deep, even the POs.

What they all have in common is that they aren't "rugged" by any definition. This is because everything they make is made as cheaply as possible. Not that these aren't well designed, but the actual materials used and the buttons, knobs, cases, etc- These are all made in the least expensive way that they can be made and still minimally work. Yes, all manufacturers want to spend as little as they can to make their designs, but they take it to a whole other level.
This isn't a big problem on a $50 PO, but it is when you look above that. I suspect that this will be similar.

Now all that being said, I can only imagine the horrible things that Foddy will come up with given a crank as an interface. Remember, it wasn't just QWOP that he made, but also "getting over it" - which is brilliantly frustrating and honestly was one of my favorite gaming experiences to go into new. The devs they have lined up are what make this very interesting to me, and something to watch.
posted by MysticMCJ at 10:32 AM on May 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


Ugh, apparently there's a nonprofit indie game festival called Playdate that's been around for years, and they've received letters from Panic saying the festival really ought to to change their name now.

Less ugh: Panic has backed off.
posted by moonmilk at 7:28 AM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


Playdate makes way more sense for an event than a physical thing. Why would you call a yellow box a date? Maybe if you specifically designed one for two-player games it would make sense.
posted by RobotHero at 8:54 AM on May 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


That year we received an email from Panic basically telling us we can’t use the name anymore because it would be a shame if our event got confused with what they are doing. It came off as incredibly self-important. It left me thinking “Wow, what a dick move.”
I write because for the past four (!!!) years a team here at Panic has been working on a gaming hardware project called, coincidentally, PLAYDATE. Got our fancy-pants federally registered trademark and everything.

(AND ALSO, if you’re curious about what our thing is, I can send you an NDA and give you the full scoop!)

[Text from links from moonmilk]

Read the whole letter at the Twitter link. I copied the two paragraphs that jumped out at me.
posted by Monochrome at 12:01 PM on May 28, 2019


The NDA part is probably less sinister than it might seem at first glance, given that the email was sent in 2018. Cabel's been doing a pretty good job of owning up to his screw-up, though. On the other hand, it also seems like a lot of people on Twitter also just sort of want to grar at a convenient target
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:19 PM on May 28, 2019


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