I Want One Of These: Atari Arcade-Duo Powered Joystick

Retro gaming is cool, but do you know what’s cooler? Retro gaming on an iPad 2. It’s the best of both worlds, and if you want to make the most of them, you need to do it with a joystick. The iCade (which started life as a ThinkGeek April Fool’s day product) is already out and selling fast, but Atari’s official controller might well blow it out the water.

Information is a little limited right now, and by limited we mean there’s one image with a three-paragraph description, but it’s enough to whet our appetites. Atari’s Greatest Hits app is already out in the app store, and you can play up to 100 of their classic arcade games with on-screen controls, but who’d want to do that when you’ve got four buttons and a joystick to get to grips with?

We don’t reckon Atari’s offering looks half as retro as the iCade, it’s sporting some classy Atari branding on its white plastic shell which seems to perfectly compliment the white iPad 2, but who cares? It’s made by Atari! It’s nice to see a company moving into the 21st century and accepting the iPad as an awesome gaming device, and if we happen to have fun on the way…well…we’ll just have to, won’t we?

There’s no word on when the Arcade-Duo joystick will be available, except for a rather tantalising ‘soon’, and there’s no pricing information either (although we have a sneaky suspicion that the design points to a possible undercutting of the iCade). Rest assured though, retro gaming fans, that we’ll be getting our hands on one as soon as they’re out and giving it a thorough review…once we’ve finished playing Asteroids.

Below is the image that Atari are linking to from their App store listing. It’s sparse, but it’s still worth a read, click on it to zoom in: