Spin It to Win It

I gotta hand it to the video game industry. I've been involved with this hobby for forty years, yet after all this time, it still hasn't lost its capacity for weirdness.

image from the Hollywood Reporter

I'm referring specifically to the Play Date, a handheld game system with black and white graphics and, well... a crank. Now it's not completely unusual for home electronics to have a crank to charge them in case of emergencies, but this crank isn't meant for that. No, it's actually a rotary input device, similar to the paddles and spinners of old. It sounds ridiculous, but maybe that's why it's attracting famously weird game designers like Katamari Damacy's Keita Takahashi and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy's, uh, Bennett Foddy. They've both pledged to support the Play Date, with Takahashi already hard at work on Crankin's Time Travel Adventure. You can find a little footage of the game and more information about the system that will play it on Slash Gear. The Play Date will cost a kingly one hundred and fifty dollars when it's released next year. Better start saving your pennies.

So in short, the Play Date is unreasonably expensive, completely bizarre conceptually, and has a crank on the side for rotary input. How much you wanna bet Jeff Minter's going to want in on this?