![]() ![]() An e-ink screen, you have this big refresh rate thing that happens every time you update it, but it’s still kind of has this feeling of old LCD games, like a Game & Watch,” says Cabel.Ī Game & Watch, for you vibrant young people who may be unaware, was a handheld gaming console made and sold by Nintendo in the 1980s. And it has kind of the reflectivity of e-ink, but it’s not e-ink, it’s like an LCD,” he says. “As best as I can remember, it was Cabel finding the screen, which is called a Memory LCD screen. Actually, I’m not sure whether the display informed the idea of the device or vice versa.” “As I was researching displays, I came across this Sharp Memory LCD display. Happy anniversary! But, you know, Panic being Panic, and Cabel being Cabel… So, yeah, we could’ve just made a cool clock. Just a cool clock, and had all sorts of bonkers ideas like… God, had an idea for something that could maybe be made out of porcelain and the case itself could ring or chime. I think one of my first ideas was a clock. The earliest ideas for this commemorative hardware project actually had nothing to do with games.Īccording to Cabel, “We talked about a lot of things in the beginning. So what better way to mark two decades of zany tangents and Panic rabbit-holes than by setting out to create some kind of novelty hardware keepsake… and then releasing it ten years later, as a quirky handheld gaming console with a robust SDK, a speaker dock, and two dozen surprise games from a variety of indie developers?īut let’s back up. That is a strange and special thing,” says Cabel. And I feel like as Panic has lasted longer and longer, I have begun to appreciate that that’s really unique and rare, especially talking to other people at different companies. Adventures and strange side projects, and just having total creative freedom without having to be beholden to anyone, or make a lot of sense, or justify everything. We enjoy what we do, obviously, or else we wouldn’t still be doing it twenty years later, but part of the reason I think why Panic is Panic, and one of the reasons why we never-so far-we haven’t sold the company or taken investments or stuff like that, is because we really appreciate the freedom of being able to do weird things. “You know, twenty years is a long time of doing the same thing. So they set their sights on Panic’s twentieth anniversary, instead. He and Steven soon realized that if they were going to make some kind of hardware device, it probably wouldn’t be finished in time for their fifteenth anniversary. And so that is why we ended up deciding to do hardware, of all things, for a software company,” says Cabel. But just to try to tackle something completely unknown and see what we can learn from it. Not that we’re experts at, you know, what we do now. And the goal was to do something that we hadn’t done before. “We wanted to do something that felt kind of like a keepsake-y kind of thing, or just like a special thing that came out of nowhere. Panic had been making software applications for the Mac since 1997, and they wanted to create something to mark the occasion. While it’s maybe a little fuzzy now, at some point he and Panic’s other co-founder, Cabel Sasser, got to talking about the company’s fifteenth anniversary, which was coming up the following year. ![]() “It’s been going on for so long that I’m actually having trouble remembering how it all started,” says Panic co-founder Steven Frank. Our story begins around 2011, though it’s hard to say exactly. Here’s how an offhand idea to mark the fifteenth anniversary of a software company launched a decade-long saga of twists, turns, and mini-boss battles that led to a gaming console as surprising and unique as its creators. For our 15th anniversary, I’ve been tinkering with an idea: find our 150 best customers, manufacture something incredibly special, and send it to them. We’re a small software company that makes Mac/iOS apps. Ten years ago, the CEO and Head of Design at Teenage Engineering, Jesper Kouthoofd, got an email: ![]() But I’m told not everybody listens to podcasts (outrageous), so I’ve made it a (long) blog post! I recently posted the sixth episode of the Panic Podcast - a wide-ranging look into the creation of Playdate, our upcoming hand held video game system, based on over nine hours of conversation. ![]()
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