TL;DR
- Atari celebrates its arcade classic Asteroids with a limited edition wristwatch.
- The watch features a cute time-telling mechanic, with your ship and a couple UFOs indicating the time.
- Atari already makes official Asteroids watch faces for Wear OS, and we would love to see this design join them.
Modern horologists have dreamt up some utterly fascinating watch designs, and even fully mechanical offerings are reaching complexity that’s nothing short of mind-boggling. And for as much as we love the flexibility of a good smartwatch, it’s very easy to get caught up in the allure of a particularly compelling traditional wristwatch. Today we’re checking out one that’s going straight for the nostalgia jugular, as Atari shares its limited edition Asteroids watch.
Asteroids hit arcades all the way back in 1979, with sharp vector-based graphics and fast-paced space combat action. The classic inspired countless other space shooters over the years, and has absolutely earned its spot in the annals of gaming. In order to celebrate that legacy, Atari teamed up with watchmaker Nubeo to put together this custom watch with an interesting time-telling mechanic.
Instead of hands to indicate the time, the Asteroids watch uses a series of rotating rings. The outer two rings are dotted with asteroids (what else), but each also features a UFO enemy — and its position indicates your hour and minutes. Then in the very center you’ve got your spinning ship, pointing outwards to act as your second hand.
While we don’t get to enjoy the warm glow of an arcade CRT, Atari pulls off what’s probably the next best thing here, painting the watch’s features with Super-LumiNova glow-in-the-dark ink. The whole production looks really high quality, with a stainless steel case, sapphire crystal, and colorful silicone straps.
So what’s the downside? Well, first, these are reasonably expensive, going for $500 each. At least, they were earlier today when they were still available, leading to the second downside: They’re totally sold out.
That’s a bummer, but we can’t stop thinking about how it doesn’t need to be the end of the Asteroid watch story. After all, this watch face design is more or less straightforward, and we can’t imagine it would be tricky at all to come up with a very close approximation that we could load on our favorite Wear OS smartwatches.
Better still, Atari already makes smartwatch faces, and even has a couple Asteroid watch faces available on Facer. Those are both very cool for what they are (you can even tap on the screen to fire with the Wear OS version) but so far there’s nothing that really aligns with the experience we see from today’s sold-out limited edition.
What do you say, Atari? Feel like making this one a little bit less limited? At least in digital form?
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