CES isn’t much of a gaming show. Every year, however, a few notable products slip through the news deluge. Created in collaboration with My Arcade, Gamestation Go fits the bill. The handheld sports a 7-inch display and comes preloaded with north of 200 titles from various Atari generations. Of course, simply being a portable game […]
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In the wake of the successful Nintendo Switch and Valve Steam Deck, we have seen a wave of PC-based, Android-based, and even FPGA-based handheld gaming systems that can sometimes be hard to tell apart. The upcoming Atari GameStation Go sets itself apart with what we're relatively sure is a first for portable gaming: built-in trackball, spinner, and number pad controls.
Gamers who cut their teeth after 1990 or so might not remember an era when arcade and home console games often relied on controls that went beyond the usual D-pad/joystick and action buttons. But there are plenty of classics from the early days of electronic gaming that just don't feel right unless you have a trackball (Centipede, Missile Command, Crystal Castles), spinner (Arkanoid, Tempest), or number pad (Star Raiders, Intellivision sports games). Many modern retro re-releases try to re-create these kinds of games with more standardized joystick and button controls, but the results can be limited at best and unplayable at worst.
The Atari GameStation Go, on the other hand, seems to be aiming for maximum retro authenticity by packing a whole host of control options into its $150, 7-inch display portable. While a prototype shell for the GameStation Go was briefly shown at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show a year ago, this year's CES is the official announcement party for a playable version of the GameStation Go.
© My Arcade / Atari
Like a lot of children of the '80s, my early gaming nostalgia has a huge hole where the Atari 7800 might have lived. While practically everyone I knew had an NES during my childhood—and a few uncles and friends' older siblings even had an Atari 2600 gathering dust in their dens—I was only vaguely aware of the 7800, Atari's backward compatible, late '80s attempt to maintain relevance in the quickly changing console market.
Absent that kind of nostalgia, the Atari 7800+ comes across as a real oddity. Fiddling with the system's extremely cumbersome controllers and pixelated, arcade-port-heavy software library from a modern perspective is like peering into a fallen alternate universe, one where Nintendo wasn't able to swoop in and revive a flailing Western home video game industry with the NES.
Even for those with fond memories of Atari 7800-filled childhoods, I'm not sure that this bare-bones package justifies its $130 price. There are many more full-featured ways to get your retro gaming fix, even for those still invested in the tail end of Atari's dead-end branch of the gaming console's evolutionary tree.
© Kyle Orland
