$400k worth of stolen Playdate consoles make heroic return after getting dumped outside a restaurant

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 order 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.

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.

“Games straight from someone’s attic workspace or the desk in the bedroom. Games straight from their weird head and their weird perspective and their weird take on what games should be. At its best Playdate gives you this – along with the nicely handled Zeldas and the Breakouts and the things it seems to feel it should give you to be well-rounded.

“Now I’ve seen it, I want more of it.”