HANDHELD GAMING
PLAYDATE
A handheld with a crank? Is this a wind-up? Are you having a funny turn? Nope, this one’s round the twist…
T he Game Boy had a D-pad and buttons. The DS got a stylus. The Playdate has… a crank handle. Why? You’d have to ask its creators, but presumably the crank’s there mostly because it’s fun. In fact, everything about this dinky handheld seems designed to raise a smile, from its vibrant yellow hue to the way new games rock up weekly (which is where the name comes from).
The Playdate is the brainchild of Mac software darlings Panic, publishers of Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch. But hardware geeks Teenage Engineering devised the crank, in part to encourage people to make games for this console that you wouldn’t be able to experience anywhere else.
The crank’s not the only oddity. The 2.7in 400x240p display is 1-bit. Even the first Game Boy’s was 2-bit, but the Playdate evokes – suitably, given Panic’s heritage – the earliest Macs. Judging by press preview units, this has had game designers working with high-contrast monochrome visuals and wrestling with an awful lot of dithering.