„I love this console, so Playdate needs its own magazine“

How Xania Lasagna, a former graphic and interior designer from Montreal, started her own fan-made magazine about one of the most unique and curious videogame consoles ever made.

By Robert Glashüttner

Before the internet was a thing, people had a hard time finding their peers. Especially if you had niche interests or spent your time with more geeky things (like playing videogames), finding folks who would share your interests was difficult just by meeting your neighbors or going to school.

Game magazines helped with that: with them, you not only realized that there had to be many more people out there enjoying the same things you did, you also experienced the broadness and depth of - in our case - videogame culture. With those gaming magazines we learned that there are a lot of games and game systems to choose from. Of course, as a kid or a teenager most of us could only manage one console at a time, two at most. Back in the 80ies and early 90ies (and let aside home computers for the sake of the argument), there were basically two major choices: You either were a Sega or a Nintendo person. Committing to either one, you would then probably also read a dedicated magazine like Nintendo Power or Sega Power (so much power!) to unlock pure fandom.

Enter Playdate

Xania Lasagna however was one of those rare 80s and 90ies kids who wasn’t shy to switch systems over the years, enjoying each one for a period of time: from Game Boy to different Sega systems to Xbox and eventually the Steam Deck. Xania also always liked to buy and read the respective magazines. But these days, she has a new crush, and it’s probably the most charming, unique, niche (but still successful!) videogame console ever seen: the tiny square-shaped yellow Playdate, made by software company Panic in cooperation with the industrial design and music firm Teenage Engineering (we covered the Playdate at FM4 in the fall of last year).

Xania Lasagna / Uncrank'd magazine

Making a magazine

Hailing from an English speaking community in Montreal, Quebec, Xania previously was a graphic and interior designer as well as a technical writer and marketing expert. When she saw one of the first articles about the Playdate in 2019, she was immediately hooked and set things in motion so she could be one of the first persons to own and use a Playdate. Getting her hands on her purchase for the first time, Xania was as enamored as she had expected to be with the device. Just one thing was missing for her experience: a dedicated magazine.

So why not make my own, she thought. And so Uncrank’d was born, a fan-made Playdate magazine whose name, of course, is referencing one of the main features of the console, the wonderfully silly crank. Aside from Xania herself, the magazine is mostly created by about seven motivated contributors.

Issue #1 of Uncrank’d first came out in late November 2023 and immediately was a perfect fit for the small but very active, wholesome and curious community of the Playdate. It featured interviews, reviews, personal stories, a coding course, an article of funny peripherals and also information on how to help charity organisations through the revenues of certain Playdate games. This is a topic that is close to Xenia Lasagna’s heart, specifically as she also develops her own games and thereby collects funds for the good cause.

That’s commendable, obviously, but what’s even more surprising is the fact that Uncrank’d’s editor can live on her game development and magazine publishing efforts. But one can imagine that it isn’t easy to pull this off, as Xania reveals in her interview with FM4. Sure, the Playdate has a vibrant, lovely community but we are still talking about a game console that has only sold 70.000 to 75.000 units to date. The number of available games for the system though has grown to over a thousand by now, comprising Panic-curated games on their official Playdate store Catalog and around 850 other titles (games and some non-games/experiments) on the independent videogame platform Itch.io. This shows an amazing output but also makes it harder for individual titles to stand out.

Xania Lasagna / Uncrank'd magazine

A rare beast

Playdate is an outlier within the wider videogame industry that is mostly driven by market research, scaling, proficiency and profit. Surprisingly, it follows almost the inverted route from the just mentioned path: Its inception was not driven by research on what a larger market wants or needs but what the people behind the idea wanted to make. The project was a big experiment for the company behind it, Panic, which struggled to even get the first 50.000 units manufactured throughout the different years of COVID lockdowns and tech supply shortages.

Although the Playdate itself has been created by industry professionals, people who want to develop games for it certainly don’t need to be proficient experts. Making games for Playdate has a low-level entry barrier, which is also something that sparked enthusiasm in Xania and many of her colleagues and friends. Lastly, Playdate surely wasn’t made to make a lot of money. It isn’t a non-commercial project, of course, but its inventors are content if the revenue is just high enough to continue going forward.

No surprise then that Playdate grew an attached, passionate community, comprising of individuals like Xania Lasagna who don’t just see this as a videogame system but instead a clever and cute little device with so much potential for creativity. It goes without saying: This little square-shaped yellow box with a crank definitely needed its own fan-made magazine.