If you cast your minds back to March, you may recall the story about some missing Playdate consoles. During a talk at GDC, company co-founder Cabel Sasser revealed pallets containing $400k worth of Panic’s palm-sized, crank-operated console had gone AWOL in Las Vegas.
At this time, Sasser called the whole situation “a bit of a true crime drama”.
However, fast forward a couple of months, and the consoles have now been returned to their rightful owner, although the circumstances still seem rather bizarre.
Sharing an update on social media platform X, Playdate said its hardware “got hastily dumped at a random restaurant this morning”.
In a subsequent post, the Playdate team said it will share more details about the whole ordeal further down the line. It noted having the consoles returned was the “best possible outcome”, adding this resolution was the result of “lots of time and detective work” – something the team enjoyed.
“The real question is, can we sell these as a limited edition? Playdate HotTM,” the team jokingly closed.
More details — and likely a very good Playdate Podcast episode — in the future. For now, this was our best possible outcome, the result of lots of time and detective work. (Which, ok fine, we enjoyed.)
The real question is, can we sell these as a limited edition? Playdate Hot™
— Playdate (@playdate) May 30, 2024
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Our Donlan reviewed the Playdate console back in 2022, calling it “a fascinating puzzle in itself”.
“Attached to my memories of Mad magazine are inevitably a bunch of memories of early home computers – the C64 and Amstrad in my case – and there’s a lot of that DNA here too,” he mused in Eurogamer’s Playdate review.