Panic Playdate

With this week being Zscaler's 15th birthday, my 8th anniversary as a Zscaler employee, our REV team winning a prestigious award, and my impending departure to President’s Club, I felt like I needed to do something special today. So, the newest installment in my “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old or Obsolete Device” series is a fun one: this is the Panic Playdate, a new handheld gaming system that is very fun and *very* weird!

Panic, Inc. has been a successful indie software company for 25 years now (a remarkable accomplishment!), and a couple years ago they teamed up with teenage engineering, a Swedish company specializing in playfully weird hardware devices. Playdate is the product of this partnership, and it’s a handheld gaming system that is somehow both familiar (the yellow color and button layout is very deliberately ‘GameBoy-like’) and totally original (IT HAS A CRANK).

Playdate is both a consumer product and a full-fledged software development kit at the same time - everyone is encouraged to create games and apps for it, and Panic provides a huge library of free and intuitive tools to get started. I pre-ordered my Playdate nearly two years ago, and when I learned that it would finally be arriving this week, I set about figuring out a way to combine our beloved Zscaler logo with the hilariously fun built-in crank on the side of Playdate.

I was able to render the logo into a simple 3D animation with DaVinci Resolve (a free video editing program), exported that video in the 400x240 display resolution of the Playdate, used a little freeware app that converts the video into a Playdate “.pdv” video file, and then used a Playdate app called Play-O-Rama to actually play the video (with crank control). All-in-all it was a fun and educational project - I’m looking forward to building more goofy stuff for this delightful little gadget!

Anyway, I hope this gives you a chuckle as you head into your weekend. Happy Friday to you all, and Happy Birthday, Zscaler!