Playdead is an independent developer and publisher founded in 2006 in Copenhagen, Denmark, by Arnt Jensen and Dino Patti, and it remains headquartered there today. Jensen, the studio's creative lead, had been sketching a shadowy, silhouetted world before the company existed; Patti handled the business side so that vision could become a game. The result was LIMBO, directed by Jensen and released July 21, 2010 on Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade. A monochrome puzzle platformer about a boy searching for his sister, LIMBO ran on a custom engine and taught its players through trial and death: the giant spider, the bear traps and the gravity-flipping machinery of its later stages were solved by dying, watching and trying again. Critics and juries responded immediately. It took Technical Excellence and Excellence in Visual Art at the 2010 Independent Games Festival, Best Indie Game at the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, Best Visual Art at the 2011 Game Developers Choice Awards, and both Adventure Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design at the 2011 D.I.C.E. Awards. Ports followed to PlayStation 3, Windows and OS X in 2011, PlayStation Vita and iOS in 2013, Linux and Xbox One in 2014, Android and PlayStation 4 in 2015, and Nintendo Switch in 2018, and sales passed one million copies by November 2011 and three million by June 2013 - a scale few independent studios of the era reached with a single title.
Six years after LIMBO, Playdead delivered INSIDE, again directed by Jensen, on Xbox One on June 29, 2016, with Windows following on July 7, PlayStation 4 on August 23, and later iOS (December 2017), Nintendo Switch (June 2018) and macOS (June 2020). Built in Unity and partially financed by the Danish Film Institute, it trades LIMBO's black-and-white for a muted, desaturated palette and a far more unsettling story, following a boy through a controlled world of surveillance, mind-control helmets and drowned laboratories toward one of the most talked-about endings in modern games. Martin Stig Andersen, who scored LIMBO, returned alongside Søs Gunver Ryberg, and the studio released its custom temporal anti-aliasing filter under an open-source license in March 2016 so other developers could use the technique behind INSIDE's smooth, film-like image. The game swept the 2016 and 2017 award season: Best Art Direction and Best Independent Game at The Game Awards 2016, four BAFTA Games Awards in 2017 for Artistic Achievement, Game Design, Narrative and Original Property, Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction and in Art Direction at the 2017 D.I.C.E. Awards, and Best Audio and Best Visual Art at the 2017 Game Developers Choice Awards, with IGN awarding it a 10 out of 10. Weeks after launch, on July 19, 2016, Dino Patti left the company and sold his shares to Jensen in a deal reported at 50 million Danish kroner, going on to co-found Jumpship with Chris Olsen. Under Jensen's leadership Playdead has grown to more than 100 employees as of 2025 and is building its third game, teased since January 2017 and described as a fairly lonely sci-fi game - a third-person adventure in a 3D world, built in Unreal Engine - with Epic Games signed on as publisher in March 2020. No title or release date has been announced, which leaves the studio's two released games, each a compact, wordless masterclass in atmosphere and physics-driven puzzle design, as some of the most essential playthroughs a PC gamer can add to their library.
