Playdate maker Panic isn't a startup, despite what you might think. The 30-person company has been around for 25 years but is often viewed as a fledgling go-getter that has just burst onto the scene.During his GDC 2024 talk, Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser dissected the company's origins through the lens of Playdate, and posited that Panic is often billed as a startup because it practices something called "slowbiz.""Let me explain what that means. We're a different kind of tech company. We're playing the long game. We gradually level up year after year. We never had investors. We never had shareholders. I think when you have shareholders, they're kind of used as a scapegoat for your bad decisions," he says."We have no one to scapegoat. Every decision falls on us. We never took any seed money. In the real world of business, this is actually pretty normal—like [if you were running] a hardware store or laundromat or whatever. But for some reason in tech, it's very unusual. And that's why people call us a startup."
Keep going and don't panic
After cutting its teeth making Mac applications, Panic eventually went through what Sasser describes as a "mid-corporate life crisis" and set out to answer the question "is there more we could be doing?" The end result was (in part) Playdate, the little yellow handheld (with a crank!) that has now sold over 70,000 units worldwide.In his talk, Sasser explains that turning the Playdate into a viable piece of hardware required Panic to overcome challenge after challenge, with manufacturers and shipping companies pulling the rug out from under them on multiple occasions and a catastrophic battery debacle derailing the entire operation during its infancy. At that stage, Sasser would've thrown in the towel had it not been for some wise words from his son.He explains that bringing Playdate to life really did take a village, but it was also helped along by the company's "slowbiz" connections. After iterating on the concept internally and building some mock-ups of its own with the help of veteran engineer Dave Hayden, who oversaw what Sasser calls internal "Dave Tests," the company eventually created a working prototype that kinda-sorta made good on its pitch of bringing the Game & Watch into the modern age.
An early Playdate prototype created by Panic
