Ah, Asteroids. One of the most iconic games of the shady underbelly of arcades is turning 46. So of course, Atari has a 45th birthday celebration lined up for 2025. Don’t ask us why Atari left the party this late – but it appears as though it was worth the wait. Atari, in collaboration with Nubeo, has announced a set of Asteroids-themed-watches that look, well there’s no other word for it: awesome.
Watch this (from afar)
We should hope so, considering the R9,300 ($500) price. But it’s more than just a pretty Asteroids face (that we absolutely wouldn’t mind sacrificing a few bucks for as an official digital face). It’s also a technical marvel, incorporating a “Japanese automatic movement” – that’s the bit that makes the watch tick – on a multi-layered Asteroids battlefield surrounded by stainless steel casing and a sapphire lens.
Don’t get it confused. You’ll be tracking seconds with the spacecraft’s shooter in the middle, while minutes and hours are handled by the UFOs orbiting the dial. It’s not what we’d call intuitive, but there you go. We don’t reckon many of the watches bought will see the light of day, but should someone like to wear their love of Asteroids on their wrist, it includes a 20 ATM rating, meaning it’ll survive a 200m plunge in the water.
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Watches banking on arcade-era nostalgia aren’t anything new, with Casio recently releasing a slew of Pac–Man time-tellers that we’ll admit fall slightly short of the standard Nubeo seems to have set here.
It’s available in a range of cosmic colours, from Nebula Blue to Plasma Pumpkin, arriving in a box that even mimics Atari’s VCS console. Just… don’t get your hopes up if you’re planning to pick one up locally. Atari reckons fewer than 700 of these bad boys have been made, and its site mentions that it only ships to customers in the U.S. Nothing is stopping you from picking up the Asteroids theme on Facer in the meantime, however.
