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Comment by fumar | Hacker News Reader

I am always impressed with the design of Teenage Engineering’s products but they have an air “pure consumerism”. I think this is that taken to its extreme. A toy that has a crank, retro screen, design-driven accessories, and the games are there but not promoted.

Compare that to the gameboy which put its games front and center with the selling point of being handheld. Admittedly, I would get the Playdate to put on my desk and admire as plastic art, but no more room.

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At some point, the medium does become important. Every computer no matter how small can do everything now, and limiting games to a specific platform is for the most part arbitrary at this point.

So if you add limitations, or extra buttons! you end up with the rare occurrence of something new! A crank is actually a really cool addition just in terms of experimenting with gameplay.

This is something well understood in the electronic music space. The limitations of the equipment can define entire genres of music. The programmer in me is very excited about doing some dev work on a limited platform.

Indeed. I really love the Kind of Bloop[0] album, an 8-bit tribute to Kind of Blue[1] by Miles Davis (often cited as the best-selling jazz record of all time). Example song here[2].

[0] https://kindofbloop.com [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kind_of_Blue [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSCObIXDCJc

My initial gut reaction to this product is that I must have it, but I know myself well enough that this would also just sit on a shelf somewhere looking cool but I would never touch it. The games look nice but I'm not a huge fan of it being black and white (just my personal taste). Plus I want to know that there will be a strong community making games, one that won't fizzle out too quick. it's great that Panic is releasing games for them but how long will that last? If they released a color version that ran Pico-8 there would be no question, I'd pre-order it immediately.

That being said, watching the video[1] on the site is making this look really enticing.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeWGukDrc1U

PICO-8 compatibility would be a killer feature even without color support.

You'd be pretty limited, games would have to be specifically built for the 1-bit aesthetic. Can't just slap a filter over them it'd be way too noisy.

Not quite PICO-8 but you can try https://arcade.makecode.com/ (esp. the TypeScript not blocks) - you can run these games on in-expensive (~$30) hardware [0]

[0] https://arcade.makecode.com/hardware/

Never heard of this and it looks rad so far. I'll give this a deeper look when im back at my laptop. Thanks!

> I know myself well enough that this would also just sit on a shelf somewhere looking cool but I would never touch it.

I would normally have the same reaction, except for whole "two new games every week" setup. I actually love these sorts of little timed deliveries, and I think it will keep me engaged.

Also, re: black and white, from what I understand they're using one of those high-contrast memory LCD screens, similar to what's on the Pebble 2. Those look super nice, kind of halfway between e-ink and a standard LCD screen.

> Teenage Engineering’s products but they have an air “pure consumerism”.

I got bad news for you buddy, video games don't have a functional purpose any greater than beautiful design. You're sort of barking up the wrong tree if you wanna take a dump on something. But I think this was said in good faith, and you should just consider that Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operators have a totally different, literally unpolished aesthetic and also sell very well.

Video games serve as entertainment and for many people an escapist solution. Yes, I own a few Pocket Operators and owned an OP-1 previously. Playdate is an evolution of TE’s design aspirations. The OP-1 included video game like animation and influences in its music engines. Similar to the OP-1, I am concerned that its strict design POV may hinder creativity. Some artists prefer limitations. I would’ve loved an editable sequencer on the OP-1. Was a backlight that hard to include for the Playdate?

Aside from entertainment video games are increasingly used as a sort of virtual socializing. Especially among Gen Z with Minecraft and Roblox. Microsoft has been tailoring the Xbox experience to be way more social-oriented and I think it will pay huge dividends for them.

> video games don't have a functional purpose any greater than beautiful design

some games do, some games don't. Different games have different goals.

> literally unpolished aesthetic

They are seemingly, or apparently unpolished. Not literally. You can bet that they spent a huge amount of time making sure it looks unpolished but still good.

I think you're having this reaction because of the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. [Nintendo's marketing for the Game Boy focused on the form and function of the device as much as its games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ej_8XBwmI). Believe it or not at some point the Game Boy's looks were considered fashionable!

> they have an air “pure consumerism”

It's not clear what you're saying here. What is "pure consumerism"? Are you suggesting that aesthetics is bad? It's a stylish object. People enjoy stylish objects.

> the games are there but not promoted.

that's probably because the developers are still working on the games and aren't ready to fully show them off yet.

Well, it sounds like to me, that TE just did the hardware design, and PANIC is really the one making the decisions for the software/games side.

That being said, Teenage Engineering is one of those brands that has massively disappointed me over time. When the OP-1 came out it was a truly innovative, beautiful, and robust synthesizer... Despite that, everything they make now just seems over-hyped, over-priced, and homogeneous.

I mean their most recent "innovations" are, no-joke: a $600 portable AM/FM + BT radio, whose only real feature is a massive buffer so you can rewind or fast forward in real-time, and a robot that dances to music.

They're great at predictable, minimal design, there is no doubt there, but that's about it.

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