teenage engineering makes a Rick and Morty Pocket Operator

Rick and Morty on a bare circuit board

On 28 May 2019, teenage engineering announced the PO-137, a limited edition Pocket Operator made in collaboration with Justin Roiland, who voices both title characters of Rick and Morty.¹ The edition was based on the PO-35 speak, a vocal synthesiser and sequencer with a built-in microphone, and Roiland voiced all eight of its voice characters.¹ A new LCD screen showed Rick and Morty visuals, and the model number referred to Dimension C-137, the home of the show's protagonists.¹ Preorders opened in July and shipping started in November.² In the UK the edition sold at £85, with matching neon green accessories such as a case and a curly audio cable sold separately.³

It was the first time the Pocket Operator carried a television franchise. A month earlier, teenage engineering had released a PO-33 edition commissioned by the record label Ghostly International for its 20th anniversary.⁴ That edition stayed inside the music world. The PO-137 took the format to the audience of an animated series on Adult Swim, co-created by Roiland.⁴

teenage engineering also adopted the show's tone for the occasion. It introduced the edition on Instagram with the line "fart into this music box!"¹ A brand known for its industrial design let a cartoon set the register of its own announcement, and in doing so signalled that the Pocket Operator could take on someone else's humour without losing its shape.

A format built to be repainted

The licences worked because of how the Pocket Operator was built from the start. When the line launched with Cheap Monday in 2015, it came without a case, its components and artwork visible on the printed circuit board.⁵ The look lives in the board graphics and the custom screen, so a new edition needs new artwork, new animations and new sounds, while the instrument underneath stays the same. Sound On Sound calls the result the "broken calculator" aesthetic.⁶

Capcom follows in October 2020. On 28 October, teenage engineering releases the PO-133 Street Fighter, a micro-sampler with 40 seconds of sample memory, preloaded with samples and animations from the game. The PO-128 Mega Man, a synthesiser and sequencer, follows on 2 December, and each costs $89.⁷ The two are based on the PO-33 and the PO-28 from the main line, and the PO-128 includes Mega Man songs as patterns.⁴ According to CDM, teenage engineering made the first contact itself and cold-called Capcom and Tomoya Kishi, its head of audio design and production.⁷ Sound On Sound sums up the appeal: "Sounds like 'Hadouken!', 'Sonic Flame' and 'Yoga Fire' trigger serious nostalgia".⁶

The games fit the instrument closely. Street Fighter and Mega Man belong to the era of 8-bit and arcade sound that the Pocket Operator already echoed in its PO-20 series.⁴ The licence therefore brings a ready-made sound world rather than only a picture on the board. For teenage engineering, that makes the Capcom editions read less as merchandise and more as a natural extension of the line.

The name goes to Google

In 2022 the direction reverses. Pocket Operator for Pixel is a free app that teenage engineering makes in collaboration with Google.⁸ It runs on Pixel 5 phones and newer, samples sound and video through the phone's camera, works with four tracks and 16 patterns, and uses Google's TensorFlow machine learning to sort the samples.⁹ This time the licensed property is teenage engineering's own. The Pocket Operator name and its way of working move onto another company's hardware, and the brand reaches phone owners who may never have held one of its devices.

What the licences do for teenage engineering

teenage engineering describes the editions in its own words: it "turned the pocket operator® into a vessel for others' creativity".⁸ The phrase names the trade. The company lends the format, and the franchise brings its audience: viewers of an animated series, players who grew up with Street Fighter and Mega Man. People who might never look for a synthesiser meet one through a character they already know.

The format also protects the brand inside the deal. Each edition keeps the exposed board, the custom segmented screen and a price in the range of the main line, which retails for under $100.⁴ The licensed product therefore reads as a teenage engineering product before it reads as merchandise. The company counts "just shy of a million units sold" across the line.⁸

The licences add to that reach without asking the brand to change its look. The franchises supply the familiar faces and the sounds people remember, and the Pocket Operator stays the recognisable frame around them. Each new edition repeats the same message about teenage engineering: its design is distinctive enough to hold someone else's characters and still be identified as its own.