Playdate pre-sells 20K devices in 17 minutes

I really like the concept of this thing and as a life long gamer with a soft spot for controllers, devices and new concepts this should be right up my alley. Nonetheless, with international shipping and taxes not even in the initial price, the value proposition for me personally is too steep. But as I said: I wish them all the success.

- Handheld game console with a focus on indie games

- Black and white display

- Analog crank on the side

- Comes with 24 free games

Sounds neat!

I've ben very excited about the Playdate since it was announced. The company behind it is one of my favorite software companies, Panic, which makes a bunch of well-known Mac apps that I use fairly often and generally find well designed; they recently got into game publishing too and published Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. The hardware was designed by one of my favorite small hardware companies, Teenage Engineering, which makes all kinds of weird and interesting audio stuff.

I have no idea how these two companies got together to make something like this, and it's definitely a bit of a departure for both of them, but I hope it works out well! I think modern tech could do with a bit more occasional weird totally-out-of-left-field small cool projects like this one.

"Playdate stated that they were interested in including games by underrepresented developers and game makers, at least one game by a woman, as well as games by queer, trans and non-binary developers."

Uugh, just focus on the games...