CRANKING INTO SECOND GEAR
Vince Pavey asks Arisa Sudangnoi, Head of Developer Relations on Playdate about Panic’s plans for the handheld as it heads into its cranked-up second season
F Arisa Sudangnoi,
Head of Developer Relations on Playdate
or fans of both handhelds and indie games, the Playdate is without a doubt one of the most interesting marvels of the modern age of
video games. If you’re unfamiliar, it was developed by Panic, an American software developer and publisher, in collaboration with Swedish consumer electronics company Teenage Engineering, and was originally released back in 2022. The Playdate has roughly the same amount of
buttons as an original Game Boy, a 1-bit display resembling e-paper, and, perhaps most curiously, a foldable mechanical crank that has since been used by developers in a variety of weird-and-wonderful ways. New games sit comfortably on its 4GB of on-board storage, and can be acquired either through Panic’s own web storefront called Catalog, or through other largely indie developer-focused websites like
Itch.io and loaded onto the device. If you’re curious about the name ‘Playdate’, well,
that comes from the original vision for the platform itself. A ‘Season One’ collection of 24 games was included in the cost of the system at launch, and every week [for three months] after launch, two new indie games were delivered and automatically downloaded for owners to play. Sadly, due to a variety of factors outside of Panic’s
control, that concept ended up being more of a nice dream than an actual reality. A lot of people that were into the idea and put in an order ended up having to wait, and for many the first season of games was already available and old hat by the time
44 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2025
they actually got their hands on the handheld. Good ideas don’t often go away so easily,
however, and Panic is set to give it another go with a batch of brand-new titles in a ‘Season Two’ collection. In the run-up to that, Arisa Sudangnoi, Head of Developer Relations on Playdate has also taken a moment to chat with us about the firm’s plans.
What makes now the right time to try the Playdate concept again? When we first released Playdate with Season One, the complexities of shipping and manufacturing, especially during a pandemic, made it difficult for the majority of people to get their Playdate around the same time. Most Playdate owners didn’t get to experience the
first round of releases for Season One with the rest of the community. With roughly 78,000 Playdates out there, a large number of people are able to start Season Two on the same day, and we can now create the experience of playing the same games together like we had hoped and imagined! There are also many experienced Playdate
developers that have made multiple Playdate games in the three years Playdate has been out. Playdate devs now have a better idea on what works well with crank and the Playdate screen, for example, and have been able to share this with newer devs in the community, so we continue to see a lot of cool stuff being made for Playdate!
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