Panic
Panic is the Portland software company that published Blippo+, the live-action television simulator Mike Merrill executive produced. If you are wondering who actually put Blippo+ out, or what the Playdate is and why a KmikeyM project shipped on one, this is the company.
What Panic is
Panic Inc. was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1997 by Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser. It spent its first two decades making Mac and iOS software, including the FTP client Transmit and the code editor Nova, and began publishing video games in 2016.
Its games have a house style that is easier to recognize than to define: small, strange, precisely made, and usually from a studio nobody expected. That disposition is the reason a channel-surfing simulator about an alien television network found a publisher at all.
The Playdate
In 2019 Panic announced the Playdate, a small yellow handheld game console with a black-and-white screen and a mechanical crank on its side, designed in collaboration with the Swedish firm Teenage Engineering. It shipped in April 2022.
The crank is not a gimmick bolted on. It is an input no other console has, which means a Playdate game cannot be a port of something else, and developers have to design for the machine rather than around it.
Connection to KmikeyM
Panic published Blippo+, which released on Playdate on May 9, 2025. Blippo+ was developed by YACHT, Telefantasy Studios, Noble Robot, and Dustin Mierau, directed by JJ Stratford, and executive produced by Merrill alongside Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans.
Panic is the publisher, not a developer or a production partner. The distinction gets flattened easily and is worth keeping straight when reading about the project.
This is the only KmikeyM-adjacent work Panic has been involved in. The relationship runs through Blippo+, not through the market.
References
- Panic Inc., Wikipedia
- Playdate (console), Wikipedia
- The Story of Playdate, Panic Blog