Mark the (Play)Date | My Year With Panic’s Peculiar Portable

The Playdate was unveiled in a cover story for Edge Magazine in May 2019 and immediately drew divisive reactions. Few could rationalize use cases for the crank, many were bewildered by the strange tech limitations and the launch price of US$179 (the final cost for mine was AU$270 including delivery) was mocked for being almost the same as a Switch Lite.
But a small, potentially deranged group were charmed by the unique design approach, nostalgic aesthetic and the creative solutions developers would have to find to adapt modern game mechanics to the intentional technological restraints.

I counted myself amongst these lunatics.

When the pre-order date rolled around in July 2021, time zone differences left me in the unfortunate position of having to stay awake until 3AM to make sure I secured my unit.
Part of me wondered if it would be worth staying up as there would likely still be stock available in the morning…. surely? And yet, in the wee hours, I watched their store page crumble the moment pre-orders went live. Demand was well beyond expectations.

Despair rang out across the Playdate Squad Discord page, a terrific fan community, where posts flooded in of people not being able to process their purchases.
I relentlessly fought through error after error to procure my mustardy machine and finally succeeded, but others weren’t so lucky.

Panic originally set out to manufacture 20,000 units of this console. They blew through that amount in twenty minutes. Even today, they’ve still only shipped a bit over 27,000 of the 53,000 consoles sold, so I count myself extremely grateful that I got in when I did.

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The Arrival

While the Playdate finally started shipping in April 2022, I was slightly behind in the order queue and shipping to Australia involved an extra delay that left me eagerly reading through other people’s experiences online.
But with such a niche product, I’ve never actually met another person who owns a Playdate in real life. I sometimes like to imagine I’m the only person who really bought one of these bizarre things.

When I pulled the console out of its packaging, I was immediately enamoured with the build quality. This thing is rock solid. I could squeeze it in the palm of my hand and feel like it wasn’t going to crumble apart (thankfully so, as it did cost me hundreds of dollars).
The crank felt as smooth and satisfying to turn as you’d hope it would be.
The lack of backlight was a controversial decision and while I do have visibility problems in low light, the screen has an e-reader like quality that I’ve never seen in video games before.
There’s this ultra crisp, tactile look to the graphics that makes the occasional visibility trade-off worth it.

But what captivated me the most was the clean, snappy operating system. You know when you sit down to play some PlayStation or Xbox games, only to be confronted with a slow boot-up logo, system updates and cluttered menus that get in your way?
The narrow focus of the Playdate serves perfectly to just drop you into whatever you were looking for and start your gaming session within seconds. This is also helped by the odd fact that the console can’t be switched off. It has a battery that lasts weeks on standby.
When I walk past my Playdate with a bit of spare time, I can pick it up, put a couple of minutes into whatever game I last played, then keep on moving without a wasted moment.

While much has been made about the retro stylings of the Playdate, particularly comparing it to the original Game Boy, it felt more evocative of the early days of mobile gaming to me.
The wasted hours trying to beat your high score in Snake while bored in math class. Showing a friend how to slash food apart with your fingers in Fruit Ninja and having them tell you it looks stupid, only to notice them downloading it on their phone moments later once the FOMO sets in.
The Playdate set up the potential for pocket-sized, easy to understand gaming experiences and once the console finally started to trickle out into customers hands, those games came in droves.

The Games

The weekly release pattern for its launch games was a big bullet point for the Playdate.
Using a season model, the first batch of games was made up of 24 titles, arriving two at a time.
A light would blink at the top of the console to let the user know that there were two new games to be unwrapped (and I mean that literally, you have to digitally unwrap the games on the main menu before playing, which is charming every time).

Whitewater Wipeout was one of the two games in the debut week and I immediately fell in love. The simple to learn, complex to master controls, snappy interface and online leaderboards gave me a game I returned to each day for many months.
Another highlight was Pick Pack Pup, a match-3 puzzle game which goes to show how certain genres just make a tonne of sense for this platform. I could grab my Playdate, zoom through the next puzzle in the game’s surprisingly well-written and humorous story mode and then drop it until I next had a chance to play.

But, the season model was not without its drawbacks. Every time I wanted to dig a bit deeper into a game like Pick Pack Pup or the crank-heavy puzzle platformer Omaze, I’d start to lag on the next week’s games until I fell further and further behind. And with each player’s season starting when their Playdate arrives, it could be difficult to discuss games online without fear of spoiling somebody else’s experience. 

Nearly a full year after the console’s launch, Panic introduced Catalog, an online store for game purchases built into the console itself. Blending a handful of brand new games with some standouts cherry-picked from Itch.io (an independent online marketplace anybody can upload their creations to, free and paid, with over 450 titles available for the platform currently).
The Playdate was rejuvenated with a new lease on life.
Lately, I’ve been hooked on Word Trip, a word game with daily challenges, that tickles the brain in the same way a satisfying newspaper puzzle would. 

Building a sizeable library of games for the platform was made possible thanks to Panic releasing easily accessible dev software prior to the console’s launch. One of those tools was Pulp, a tile-based drag-and-drop interface with coding capabilities, that allowed users of a broad skill range to try to build their dream game.

But as I found out, maybe being a game designer isn’t for everyone. 

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The Amateur Developer

I love making things and can get swept up in little projects that consume months of my life. Once I started playing around with Pulp, I became hooked and this is where I ended up spending most of my time with the Playdate over the past year. 

My game was Arizona James and the Saga of Speed, a kitschy Indiana Jones parody in which you had to ascend through fifteen obstacle-filled floors, randomly selected from a pool of 45, as quickly as possible.
I really wanted to finish the project and keep it very basic, so I decided that once I’d finished, I’d package it up and upload it for free on Itch.io to get feedback towards maybe making a second, more complex game. 

How the simplest plans can go awry…

I made up the 45 levels pretty quickly, but after spending day after day staring at the same graphics, I decided to start getting more ambitious, making grand illustrations that would take me days to animate.
I later expanded from the one simple game mode to three separate ones and added difficulty options for each of them. To add replayability, I introduced unlockable bonus characters.
Adding each feature meant the shoddy code I was writing became increasingly complex, like a house of cards falling apart after every change.
I had one level with spikes that was tanking the framerate and when I figured out the solution, fixing it would have taken me a week of rewriting code in my limited spare time.
The feature creep had taken hold, to the point that I felt I didn’t have it in me anymore. 

I put Arizona James to one side, vowing to return to it later to make good on the months of work I’d put in.
Meanwhile, other hobbyist developers I’d seen posting on Discord or Reddit finished their projects and released them. I’d download and enjoy them, but I’d feel this tinge of frustration that I couldn’t get my game together.

Over time, I began to feel like I wasn’t enjoying my Playdate as much anymore. 

Some months passed and the Playdate eventually returned to my gaming rotation.
With a bit of separation, those games I didn’t initially give a fair chance, have become some of my favourite titles.
RDK’s slick Picross entry Sketch, Solve, Share is probably my most played game and the Vampire Survivors-inspired Core Fault is a novel take on the genre (the entertaining development journey for this game is documented on the SquidGod YouTube channel). 

Maybe game development wasn’t for me in the end, but with the fullness of time, I can look back on my project not as a failure, but a great learning experience that I had a lot of fun doing.
And hey, there’s still an alpha for my game, 90% complete, sitting on the main menu of a real-deal console that I own, and that’s a pretty damn cool treat.

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The Future

With the introduction of Catalog, Panic opened a pathway to keep the Playdate a viable platform going forward into the future. A recently announced price increase may turn away new customers, but the Playdate seems to have found the narrow audience it was striving for and I reckon they’ve already achieved just about everything they set out to do. 

So, after twelve months with this distinctive device, would I recommend it?
If you’ve read this far, then I think you can probably answer that question for yourself.
If you’re intrigued, you should probably get it because they’ve accomplished their highly specific goals extremely well. But holy moly, this device isn’t for everyone and if you think the whole thing sounds silly, I can easily see how you’d arrive at that conclusion. 

For me, the Playdate is a bright light in a world of ballooning development budgets, safe blockbuster franchises and mammoth development times in AAA gaming.
That it found a path to success in targeting a small, but fanatical audience just goes to show the open-ended potential of the games industry at its best.
While the Zeldas and Diablos out there deservedly eat up a lot of our time, the indie games space has been a breeding ground for experimental and innovative ideas.
Going a step further and weirder with the Playdate, helps the idea that if someone wants to get into gaming but the standard mainstream titles aren’t doing it for them, there’s a whole world of other experiences out there that might be more their speed.
The way our gaming community facilitates these projects and allows them to succeed, helps this hobby be a more welcoming and accessible space.

And after all, don’t we want everybody to join in with us, scheduling in some time for a session of recreation? 

Wait, is there a word for that?