Playdate, a tiny game console with a big pedigree

Playdate is a tiny yellow game console with a hand-crank (!) and a monochrome display. It's being made by Panic and Teenage Engineering, with a launch roster full of game auteurs such as Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy) and Bennett Foddy (QWOP, Getting Over It). It'll be $150 and it comes out next year.

Playdate isnt just the hardware.

Its twelve brand new video games, one each week.

What are these games? Heres the thing: wed like to keep them a secret until they appear on your Playdate. We want to surprise you.

Some are short, some long, some are experimental, some traditional. All are fun.

When your Playdate lights up with a brand new game delivery, we hope you cant wait to unwrap your gift.

There's a software development kit announced too: games are coded in Lua (as with the popular Lve and Pico-8 game engines) and C.

These are the folks behind some of the best MacOS apps going, working with top indie devs and the hardware people who created the legendary OP-1 synthesizer. I can't wait to get one and will definitely be making some brutally difficult games for it.

I'm seeing a lot of comparisons to the Gameboy, but 400240 at 2.5" is about three times the pixel density -- not quite what Apple would qualify as a retina display, but close. So games won't have the retro blocky vibe some expect, unless a dev is intentionally pixel-doubling.

The first teaser screenshots remind me of the original mono Macs, in factno surprise given Panic's history! Read the rest