You own half a dozen retro consoles, collect retro cartridges, and spend a good load of your free time playing ROMs on the Steam Deck. Yeah, you got the retro gaming fever bad. Might as well go all out and indulge your retro gaming soul whenever you check the time with the Nubeo Ventana Atari Asteroids Watch.
That’s right, it’s a timepiece based on Atari’s classic multidirectional shooter from back in the day, giving you one more way to celebrate a beloved game from yesteryear. Can you play Asteroids on it? Sadly, no, as it isn’t a digital watch. Instead, it’s a pretty stylish analog watch with automatic movement whose dial looks ripped straight out of a video game arcade screen from 1979.
The Nubeo Ventana Atari Asteroids Watch has a dial designed to represent the polygonal graphics from the original game. As such, it’s filled with small asteroids floating about in outer space, as well as two enemy UFOs and, of course, your fighter ship blasting its weapon systems at everything in its way. The dial consists of three concentric moving discs, with the imagery spread out among them. The two outer dials contain one enemy UFO each, with their position representing the current hour and minute, while the center dial hosts the player’s ship, which spins continuously with the passing of the seconds.
While the Asteroid graphics are fun and all, the real fun here is watching all the different elements spinning around, so we wouldn’t blame you if you spend a bit too much time readjusting the time over and over just to watch the darn things move. Instead of the black and white graphics of the original game, though, the shapes here are drawn with colored lines, which does make the watch feel a little more vibrant compared to the humdrum grays and blacks it would otherwise get. Oh yeah, they also use Swiss Super Lumi-Nova on various parts of the dial to ensure you can check the time in the dark.
The Nubeo Ventana Atari Asteroids Watch has a 50mm watch case, so it’s on the bigger end of the scale, with the screw down crown situated on the lower right section. The case is made from stainless steel, with a sapphire lens on top and a 20 ATM rating, so you can bring outer space into the water. The watch is powered by a Japanese automatic movement, which, we’re guessing, is the same one Nubeo uses throughout the entire Ventana range, so it should provide reliable timekeeping. It comes with a 24mm silicone strap with a buckle closure.
Apparently, this watch is being made in celebration of the game’s 45th anniversary, which, truth be told, is as good an excuse as any. We love the packaging for it, by the way, which makes the whole thing look like a game console, instead of a watch. It comes in five colorways, each of which are limited to 125 pieces.
The Nubeo Ventana Atari Asteroids Watch is available now, priced at $499.