Blippo+
Blippo+ is a live-action television simulator and full-motion video game published by Panic Inc. in 2025. Players channel-surf through the programming of an alien TV network called Blippo+, piecing together the culture of fictional Planet Blip from 1-minute program segments across nine channels. It was executive produced by Mike Merrill alongside JJ Stratford (director), Jona Bechtolt, and Claire L. Evans, and developed by YACHT, Telefantasy Studios, Noble Robot, and Dustin Mierau. The tagline is “Everything’s about to get bent.”
Blippo+ is Merrill’s largest creative production to date. It launched on Panic’s Playdate handheld on May 29, 2025, and expanded to Steam, Nintendo Switch, and itch.io on September 23, 2025. It has earned four Independent Games Festival (IGF) nominations and a Herman Melville Award nomination for Best Writing in a Game at the New York Game Awards.
Concept
Blippo+ recreates the experience of late-night channel surfing through a cable television system that does not exist. The programming consists of 11 batches of 1-minute segments distributed across 9 to 10 channels, running in real time on a 5-minute loop (or, on the Playdate version, on an 11-week real-time cycle that is identical for every player, mimicking traditional broadcast television). Players use an in-game Electronic Program Guide to navigate, and a text-based in-fiction forum service called Femtofax provides additional context and community elements.
The Playdate version is monochrome and uses the console’s crank and gyroscope controls. The Steam, Switch, and itch.io versions are full color, include unlockable content, and feature a signal calibration mechanic.
Critics have compared the aesthetic to “Tim & Eric” meets “The Twilight Zone” and praised what one review called “the authenticity of the programming to 1980s and 1990s television.” GameSpot gave it 7 out of 10.
Team
The Blippo+ core team draws heavily from Merrill’s longstanding creative network. Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are both members of the band YACHT; Bechtolt co-founded Urban Honking with Merrill around 2001, and Evans was a contributor to the collective. JJ Stratford, who directed Blippo+, runs Telefantasy Studios and has collaborated with YACHT on music videos and visual projects for years.
Executive Producer: Mike Merrill Producers: Jona Bechtolt, Claire L. Evans, JJ Stratford Director: JJ Stratford Composers: Rob Kieswetter, Jona Bechtolt Development: YACHT, Telefantasy Studios, Noble Robot (Switch and Windows), Dustin Mierau (Playdate) Publisher: Panic Inc. Editor: Liza Cadinale
The Panic connection
Blippo+ is published by Panic Inc., the Portland software company where Merrill worked for approximately ten years before quitting in 2013 to co-found Chroma. Panic’s Playdate handheld, launched in 2022, is the console that hosted Blippo+‘s debut. Merrill executive produced what became, by Panic’s own description, one of the most expensive Playdate games ever made, for the company that had been his professional home for a decade. The arc from customer service representative at Panic to executive producer on a flagship Panic title is one of the stranger career shapes in KmikeyM’s history.
Reception and awards
Independent Games Festival (2026): Four nominations, including Best Overall Game (the Seumas McNally Grand Prize category), Excellence in Audio, Best New Game, and Excellence in Design. Only one game in the 2026 IGF cycle (Baby Steps) received more nominations.
New York Game Awards (2026): Nominated for the Herman Melville Award for Best Writing in a Game, competing against Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, Avowed, The Hundred Line, Mafia: The Old Country, and Ghost of Yōtei.
Players on the Slug Game Club reported preferring the Playdate release format (weekly, slow-drip) over the all-at-once PC and Switch versions, a reception that vindicated the original design instinct to match traditional broadcast television’s pacing.
Significance
Blippo+ sits at the intersection of several threads that have run through Merrill’s career: earnest love of media as a craft (see Portland Sportsman), long-term collaboration with the YACHT/Urban Honking network, and a willingness to produce work that has no obvious commercial category. It is simultaneously a video game, a piece of experimental television, and a fictional channel lineup. The project treats broadcast-era television not as nostalgia but as a living format worth extending.
The fact that the publisher is Panic, and the handheld platform is the Playdate (Panic’s own hardware), makes Blippo+ a kind of return to the company that shaped Merrill’s understanding of how small, idiosyncratic software businesses operate.
Connection to KmikeyM governance
Blippo+ was a long-term confidential project, which created an ongoing challenge for Merrill’s obligations to KmikeyM shareholders. Unlike the one-time confidential vote that launched Chroma in 2013, Blippo+ required sustained secret work across multiple years. In August 2025, Merrill proposed The Privacy and Governance Vote, a formal tiered framework for handling exactly this kind of sustained confidential commitment. It passed with 86% support. Blippo+ was the proximate cause of the policy change, even though the project itself had been underway for years before the governance question was formalized.