Playdate

The original Game Boy unabashedly whipped ass and I played enough Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Tetris on mine as a child to power the family fridge. It was the perfect object for its era, and has since become emblematic to me, in the same way the original iPod has, of a simpler time when tech form and tech function felt more focused and in sync. It had an On/Off switch, 2 buttons, and a D pad, and only delivered the worlds we asked for, which is the kind of simplicity that these days rarely comes cheap.

There’s a cycle which we don’t need to get into now that most consumer products go through. The gist of it is that for awhile, something exists as the most advanced way to experience whatever it delivers, and then 20ish years later it comes back around because its delivery system has become so quaint that the limitations of the format have now become a product in and of itself. If something makes it through this cycle, it’s pretty likely it will be around to some degree forever because now the people who buy it love it for what it is rather than just what it gets them. Some quick examples of this would be fixie bikes, or vinyl records, or exposed brick.

Or the Game Boy. Meet Playdate. I haven’t had a chance to get my hands on one of these yet and see what it’s like, but the concept of single purchase games and comics on a device that is purposefully archaic in some ways and intelligently modern in others is fucking heaven to me. This is the sort of shit that will live in the later stages of my museum if I ever make one, and (as is often the case) it’s made by LEGENDS. This time around they happen to be the ones at Panic, Inc and Teenage Engineering. I found it because I follow this dude who just made an interactive comic for it, and then I looked into the template code he dropped for making your own at home. And then I screamed.

Oh and also, it’s releasing games in seasons (in batches of 2 a week) which is sick. Everything should be structured like the opera.