Whitewater Wipeout (Playdate S1 #1)

An arcade-type game where you use the crank to try to keep your surfer on the waves as long as possible while doing tricks to score points. Really, that’s more or less it. Most of my interest in Whitewater Wipeout comes from the pause it gave me about what it means to be a system’s first game.

You get two games every week in Playdate’s ‘Season One’. This is likely the first one of the two you will play because it shows up first in the system menu. I mentioned in my last post that the Playdate feels like a Game Boy with its limited inputs and small monochrome display. For many, that system is synonymous with its pack-in game, Tetris. Easily understood and infinitely addictive, Tetris kicked the door open not only for people who didn’t have the time or living scenarios for console or arcade gaming, but people who didn’t even know videogames were something they’d like. There’s a generation of people for whom the medium begins and ends with Tetris. From cartridge one, the Game Boy’s place in history was assured.

Not every first pack-in game can change the world like Tetris, but I’d say it should function as something of a mission statement for its system; showcasing its strengths or what it brings to the medium. Sonic the Hedgehog deliberately and directly kicked sand in the face of a particular market competitor with graphics and speedy scrolling that their rivals Nintendidn’t have. Wii Sports was the ideal demonstration for how the Remote could intuitively remove the most obtuse roadblock for non-gamers, the controller. Whitewater Wipeout is here to tell me that… the Playdate has an analogue crank. Perhaps developer Chuhai Labs (incidentally, run by Giles Goddard of Star Fox development fame) didn’t know that their game would be the first thing most Playdate owners would play. Maybe they had no input in how the Season One schedule got rolled out. It’s a solidly built toy of a game that does one thing and just one thing very well, but it feels like a shortsighted first pick.

On first impression, I wrote a pretty dismissive and now-deleted tweet where I basically called it a tech demo, and I bounced off of it within 15 attempts to keep my dude on his board for more than a minute. While the crank felt great to spin, WW didn’t show me how it could be a gateway to exciting new or exclusive experiences, or like it was solving a problem I’d had with other systems. Had my Playdate not had firmware issues that required an assisted factory reset, I’d probably never have touched it again. I’m glad I did though, because somewhere around my thirtieth or so attempt, something clicked. Like the first time you don’t fall off your bicycle immediately, I was able to keep my surfer on water longer than a few seconds. I was in the pocket. The inertia was mine. I understood. The trick was to launch off waves and make sure that the board’s nose was pointing directly back down. It was a simpler, less potent version of that rush you get when the music starts playing for a few seconds consistently in QWOP – I’m doing it! I’m doing it! I’m actually doing i– ah, well, I was, for a moment there. One more try… 

Soon enough, I was doing triple-360s like they were nothing, able to keep my surfer up as long as I was giving it my full attention. But to what end? Getting higher scores. The online leaderboard, predictably, has scores so astronomically high I wonder if the runs that they were earned on are counted in minutes or hours in duration. Tetris, too, is a high-score beater, but the mass appeal lies in the randomisation and the tangible sense of improvement, making bigger plans and gambles in anticipation of future blocks. That’s a very different form of reward from WW, where high-level performance feels like pulling off a string of sick fingerboard tricks. You’ll enjoy it as long as you find the momentum and rhythm of skillfully using the crank enjoyable. For me, that was about 90 minutes. For you, it could be less or a lifetime.