Panic has announced new plans for the debut of its retro-styled, Pacific Northwest-developed portable gaming device, the Playdate, after COVID-related shutdowns forced the company to abandon its original 2020 release date.
The Playdate was announced by Panic, headquartered in Portland, Ore., in May of last year. It’s an old-fashioned handheld console, made to run black and white 2-bit games on a 2.7-inch unlit screen, with a special hand-crank controller on its side and a modern content delivery system. The original plan was that once you bought a Playdate, you were automatically signed up for its first “season” of 12 original games, each of which would be wirelessly transmitted and installed to the Playdate as soon as they were available for no additional cost.
Panic Tweeted back in March that the Malaysian factory it was using to manufacture the first batch of Playdates had been closed due to local lockdowns. Only a few hundred Playdates had actually been made at that point, all of which were shipped out to interested software developers. Since then, Panic’s announcements have focused largely on its development efforts, although there was a teaser in August about a forthcoming “big update,” which finally landed on October 30.
Friends, it's time for a Playdate Update.
SUMMARY: a rough year, a small delay, but lots of good! Orders should now be starting in early 2021, our "season one" of games now has even more games than we planned, and mass production is starting.
Read: https://t.co/lyoZ5Rd5Sg
— Playdate (@playdate) October 30, 2020
Orders for the Playdate are now planned to open in early 2021 for $149 with an expanded number of launch titles, and mass production of the retail unit will commence in November. Panic intends to announce the entire new lineup for Playdate’s Season One in a forthcoming video update. The only one that’s been made public so far is Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, a platformer by Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy), which was playable at last year’s PAX West convention in Seattle.
Panic is also planning to manufacture and ship the Playdate in small batches (of course they are, they’re from Portland), starting with an initial run of 20,000 units. “We don’t want Playdate to ever be ‘sold out,'” the company wrote on its official site. “The idea is to make Playdates in batches and do an open order — everybody who wants one can order one. Then, your Playdate will arrive based on when you ordered, and what batch you’re in.”
What’s more interesting is Panic’s emphasis on home development. Every Playdate, Panic says, is also a devkit for interested developers. Anyone who owns one will be able to make their own games for it, and third-party games can be installed directly onto a Playdate without Panic’s involvement.
Panic has used the time from its unplanned delays to continue to tweak both the Playdate’s hardware and its software, including improvements to the Playdate’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and an emulation program for the Playdate that runs on Windows. The SDK is planned to be offered to the public for free at an unspecified point in the future. In theory, then, the real reason to own a Playdate might be its value as a toy for hobbyists and amateur game developers.
The delay to 2021 does put the Playdate in a somewhat more awkward position than it was, however. On top of the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5, which are likely to dominate a lot of headlines going into the new year, 2021 has turned into a big year for boutique consoles. This includes the Atari VCS, a retro-themed throwback that ships with its own subscription service and a lineup of ’80s arcade hits (and which is ostensibly still scheduled for a fall 2020 release, but we’ll see how long that lasts); the Intellivision Amico in April, a Linux-fueled machine that’s planned to run a library of reimagined and classic games; and the Analogue Duo, a faithful recreation of the ill-fated cult-classic Turbo Duo console from the ’90s.
The Playdate was always going to sink or swim based on how quickly it could pull together its audience into a community, but it’s got a lot more competition now than it would’ve if it had snuck out earlier in 2020. With that in mind, it’s smart to focus on the system, as Panic has, as both a portable console with an exclusive lineup and a cool toy for current and aspiring developers.
Panic was founded in 1997 as a software developer specializing in apps for iOS platforms, including Transmit, Coda, and Audion. It branched out into video game publishing in 2016 with Campo Santo’s award-winning 2016 adventure game Firewatch, and followed up with a truly unexpected viral hit in 2019 in House House’s bad-bird simulator Untitled Goose Game. The Playdate is Panic’s first foray into making any kind of hardware, and is being made pretty much just because Panic felt like doing it.
