Panic Inc.

Panic Inc. is an American software development and video game publishing company based in Portland, Oregon. The company specializes in macOS and iOS applications and began publishing video games in 2016.

Panic was founded by Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser in 1997.

Products

Software

Panic is known for their flagship app Transmit, as well as their Audion media player, Unison usenet client, and Nova code editor (a successor to their web development app Coda). The company has won multiple Apple Design Awards for their products.

In 1999, Audion was introduced as a skinnable MP3 media player. One of its competitors, SoundJam MP, was acquired by Apple in 2000 and was further developed into iTunes 1.0, which became available in 2001. Panic retired Audion in 2004 and began distributing it free of charge.

After Audion, Panic focused development on two other software applications. In 2004, they released Unison, a Usenet reader, and Stattoo, a tool that shows "digital statistics" overlaid on the Mac OS X desktop wallpaper. In 2007, the web development application Coda was introduced. In 2019, Panic announced a successor to Coda named Nova.

Video games

The company published their first video game, Firewatch, on February 9, 2016. Panic published their second game, Untitled Goose Game, on September 20, 2019.

Playdate

On May 22, 2019, Panic unveiled Playdate, a handheld gaming device, designed by Panic in collaboration with the Swedish firm Teenage Engineering. The device features a 400x240 pixel 1-bit screen, a directional pad on the left, two buttons on the right, and a mechanical crank on the right edge of the device.

Games on Playdate are released in "seasons", where there are two new games each week, automatically downloaded to the device when available. Also, there is a store of additional games to buy on demand, the ability to sideload games to the device, and two environments to self develop games. While some video games for Playdate are being produced at Panic, most of the games are created by indie game developers such as Keita Takahashi, Zach Gage, Bennett Foddy, Shaun Inman, and Lucas Pope.

Awards