Left turn
One Edge cover and a pandemic later, Playdate winds up for launch
The pictured game is Lost Your Marbles, which comes courtesy of Kim Belair and Sweet Baby Inc, and will launch via a season release. Watch out for Whitewater Wipeout from Chuhai Labs (formerly Vitei Backroom)
Yes, it’s still happening. Panic’s little square of sunshine, Playdate – a handheld console featuring a reflective 1bit LCD screen, a remotely-delivered season of games developed by some of the indie scene’s leading lights, and a pop-out crank – was announced on the cover of Edge well over a year ago. The reaction was instant, and much bigger than expected. The Portland-based software-turnedhardware creator was hoping to open preorders in autumn, with a full launch to follow later that year. But we all know what came next. So, we ask Cabel Sasser through a half-grimace: how’s your 2020 been?
JOY DIVISION
Now Panic has so many interested parties, it’s thinking about how to make sure a broader variety of people are happy with Playdate. “We have this particular vision, and we want to push people a little bit,” Sasser says. “But we also don’t want to make anyone angry. Like, this thing should not generate bad feelings.” Whether to only restrict people to a staggered delivery of games has been a point of contention: “Greg [Maletic, director of special projects] and I are just constantly talking about advent calendars and probably driving everybody crazy. Because there’s no reason why you can’t flip the top open and eat all the chocolates, right?” We note that it does feel miserly to be prescriptive about joy. “Actually, our biggest concern was, if one game becomes a real standout success that everybody’s talking about, you just want to play the one that everybody’s talking about,” he says. “We need these little release valves. So I can’t wait to tell you more about it. But I think we have a potential balance on how to say, ‘This is our intended vision, but if you need to sort of escape and not be angry, there’s a way’.”