Panic Inc. is an American

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

and

video game publishing A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that have been developed either internally by the publisher or externally by a video game developer. They often finance the development, sometimes by paying a video game developer ...

company based in

Portland, Oregon Portland ( ) is the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...

. The company specializes in

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

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 The Audion was an electronic detecting or amplifying vacuum tube invented by American electrical engineer Lee de Forest as a diode in 1906.De Forest patented a number of variations of his detector tubes starting in 1906. The patent that most cle ...

media player,

Unison Unison (stylised as UNISON) is a Great Britain, British trade union. Along with Unite the Union, Unite, Unison is one of the two largest trade unions in the United Kingdom, with over 1.2 million members who work predominantly in public servic ...

usenet client, and Nova code editor (a successor to their web development app Coda). The company has won multiple

Apple Design Awards The Apple Design Awards (ADAs) is an event hosted by Apple Inc. at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The purpose of the event is to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh and iOS software and hardware produced by independent ...

for their products. In 1999, Audion was introduced as a skinnable

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

media player. One of its competitors, SoundJam MP, was acquired by Apple in 2000 and was further developed into

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

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 Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

reader, and Stattoo, a tool that shows "digital statistics" overlayed 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 ''Firewatch'' is an adventure game developed by Campo Santo (company), Campo Santo and published by the developer in partnership with Panic Inc., Panic. The game was released in February 2016 for Linux, OS X, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox ...

'', 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 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 games are created by indie game developers such as Keita Takahashi, Zach Gage,

Bennett Foddy Bennett Foddy is an Australian video game designer based in New York. Raised in Australia and trained as a moral philosopher on topics of drug addiction, Foddy was a bassist in the electronic music group Cut Copy and a hobbyist game designer wh ...

, Shaun Inman, and Lucas Pope.

Awards

References

{{Panic Inc. American companies established in 1997 Macintosh software companies Companies based in Portland, Oregon Software companies based in Oregon Privately held companies based in Oregon Video game companies of the United States Video game companies established in 1997 Software companies established in 1997 Video game publishers 1997 establishments in Oregon Software companies of the United States Apple Design Awards recipients Panic Inc.