There’s no shortage of ways to get your retro game fill these days, with tons of retro gaming handhelds and apps that allow you to play all sorts of vintage titles. The market for them just continues to keep buzzing, after all. If you’re an Atari fan, though, you’ll probably want to ignore all that and get your hands on the Atari Gamestation Go instead.
Created by My Arcade, the gaming handheld gives you a convenient to play Atari titles on the go, coming preloaded with hundreds of titles that have previously released on Atari consoles through the years. Even better, they offer an unusual assortment of control options, allowing you to play the games any way you prefer.
The Atari Gamestation Go is a gaming handheld with a large 7-inch color display, which has become standard for modern gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck, so you don’t have to squint your eyes as you would on devices with tinier screens. It has an HDMI port, too, so you can plug it to a TV to enjoy big screen gameplay, as well as a USB-C port for connecting external gamepads. That’s right, you can, basically, use it as a tethered old-school home console. While Atari has previously released retro game consoles for use with a TV, this one’s particularly enticing because it has way more games than any of those older releases.
Specifically, the gaming handheld comes with a whopping 200-plus games. That includes classic titles, such as Pac-Man, Super Break Out, Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command, RealSports, Berzerk, and more. They’re not just sticking with properties from the 2600, 5200, and 7800 consoles, either, as they’ve struck deals with other outfits such as Jaleco, PIKO, and even Balls of Steel (which makes pinball games), allowing them to really make this quite the retro gaming treat.
The Atari Gamestation Go doesn’t just have a unique collection of preloaded games, it also offers arguably the most unique set of controls we’ve ever seen on a gaming handheld. While it’s got the standard D-pad on the left side, four action buttons on the right, and bumper button on the shoulders, they also throw in a paddle controller, a trackball, and even a numeric keypad to let you play games the way they were played on their original consoles. Even better, each of the controls has a LED ring around them that glows any time a game that uses those controls is launched, allowing you to play them the way the original devs intended. Hopefully, there’s a way you can remap actions if you don’t want to use any of the special controls.
The device houses a rechargeable battery rated at up to five hours of continuous playtime, which does seem a bit short for something meant to be taken on the go that plays lightweight games. There’s no Bluetooth, by the way, so you can’t use it with your favorite wireless controllers, although it does have Wi-Fi to enable easy over-the-air updates.
The Atari Gamestation Go is now available for preorder, priced at $179.99. Deliveries are slated for next month.
