Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azf-4xQ8oA8
How Many Inputs!? The Atari GameStation Go Is Wild! (Second Channel)
Introduction
The GameStation Go is a new handheld emulator console from My Arcade and Atari, supporting spinner, trackball, d-pad, numeric keypad and external controller inputs and featuring built-in games (TBC) and a MicroSD slot.
Script
If you’ve been watching this channel, or my main channel, Ctrl-Alt-Rees, for any length of time, you will no doubt be well aware that I am a massive Atari fan. It’s something that started when I was a kid. My very first gaming experience was on the 2600 Junior, which would have been around 1989, I think.
And then I got my own Atari STE in 91. Very lucky kid, indeed. It’s a brand that’s always stuck with me and something that I’ve always kind of covered and I want to increase that coverage in 2025 as part of my improved - you know - my bigger focus on YouTube as a thing so make sure you are subscribed to this and my main channel Ctrl-Alt-Rees if you don’t want to miss out on all of that - but as mentioned it’s a love affair that started at a very early age and I’m actually really liking what the current iteration of Atari are doing - not so much the crypto stuff that they were trying to do a few years ago, but it seems that, thankfully, they have kind of wound that down a little bit and focused more on the kind of the recreations of the retro hardware and stuff like that.
So the 2600+ which was absolutely fantastic. The 7800+ which I reviewed on my main channel - and they’re also doing some other interesting bits of merchandise and bits and bobs. One thing that I think is well worth mentioning is the whisky decanter set. Which my wife very kindly bought for me for Christmas.
And we did get this out on New Year’s Eve, but unfortunately we ended up drinking so much wine that by the end of the night, whisky seemed like a very ill advised idea. So still waiting to try this out. But yeah, they’re doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things and it’s really great to see - and this time last year, here on the second channel, I did a video talking about their current range of consoles and some new upcoming hardware that they announced for 2024.
And there has been quite a big update on one of these consoles, so that’s what I’m going to talk about in this video. This is the - it was known at the time as the GameStation Portable, but has since been announced that it’s going to be called the GameStation Go - and this is noteworthy because of its rather interesting selection of controls - but first I’ll talk a little bit about the company that makes this.
So this is My Arcade and they are known for their range of little miniature arcade machines and things like that. Officially licensed stuff with Namco and Atari and other companies like that. There’s an officially licensed Tetris pocket console I can see on the website here. A little Pole- I quite like that.
I do like a bit of Pole Position. Yeah, Pole Position arcade machine. I don’t own any of their stuff. This is something that I definitely need to rectify in 2025, I think, if the channel gets big enough that I can justify stuff like this. But yeah, their probably biggest and most expensive and best known Atari product is their GameStation Pro.
So this is a TV console with some really interesting looking joystick controllers. It’s got these funky looking RGB lights. The joystick controllers have got built in spinners, which is quite cool to support some of Atari’s old arcade games and stuff like that - and it has 200- over 200 built-in games covering various Atari consoles from the past, and you can plug it into your modern TV using HDMI - and it’s got all the stuff that you would expect from a modern SoC emulator, you know, software emulator based console, which is very nice - and finally, the one other thing from them that I just want to mention before we talk about this GameStation Go, is their Atari 50 range.
So yeah, you know, My Arcade are known for their little miniature arcade machines and handhelds, so it was inevitable that they would do a range of those for Atari’s 50th anniversary - and these are really cool looking things as well. So you’ve got the Micro Player, the Nano Player, and the Pocket Player - which play a range of mainly Atari 2600 games, VCS games, I guess it’s fair to say. But that’s kind of what this company is predominantly known for. Of course, Atari don’t manufacture their own hardware nowadays. It’s all kind of outsourced to external companies like Plaion, for example, who did the 2600+ and the 7800+ - and they’ve partnered with a well known and kind of well respected console maker for this one as well. So I am expecting it to be, again, quite a decent product. So yesterday they dropped this video, this preview for CES 2025. So this thing is actually going to be officially released at CES this year - and CES starts on the 7th of January, which is just in a few days time.
So we’re finally going to be able to get our hands on this thing and see some actual proper reviews and things. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the hardware and just refresh your memory on this because this thing, this thing is really cool. I really love what they’ve done with this. So for a start, in this teaser video on the My Arcade channel, we can see the controls.
And I’ve just paused it here so we can have a closer look. This is a spinner on the left hand side, and then there’s a D pad and a trackball. So, yeah, Atari’s games, you know, of course, are probably best known for their arcade stuff, I guess. I mean, obviously the arcade side of the company and the home computing, home gaming stuff were kind of separate entities for most of Atari’s existence.
But obviously their arcade stuff, they’ve got all these classic you know, spinner games using the you know, rotary controller. Obviously starting with Pong, I guess, was the first, and they’ve got stuff like you know, Breakout, stuff like that, over the years - and a trackball, and you think, well, why on earth would you want a trackball controller?
But of course, I mean, like Centipede, Missile Command, I mean, Missile Command, if you played the original arcade cab with that huge stonking great trackball on it, it’s such a fantastic thing. So, seeing You know, supporting those old games, presumably it will have hundreds of games built in. I don’t think they have officially announced a lineup yet.
That will be coming at CES. But yeah, being able to play those trackball games the way they were intended to be played with a trackball is very, very cool. On the back here, just kind of proceeding through this video, we’ve got the L1 and L2 buttons, and I presume R1 and R2 buttons. On the other side, so your shoulder buttons, And this is the next interesting point.
So this, as you can see, it’s a numeric keypad - and this was something I had quite a lot to talk to say about last year as well, when they first unveiled this console. So, of course, the Atari Jaguar had a numeric keypad. I’m not quite sure if this thing’s going to support Jaguar games. Of course, we’ve got BigPEmu, as it’s known nowadays - and I believe, in fact, there is definitely an ARM build for that. Presumably this is running on an ARM system on a chip, so it’d be really cool if we could see some Jaguar games running on this and supporting that with that keypad - and perhaps also, most famously, the 5200 console as well. Very underrated console in Atari’s history.
Also featured a numeric keypad on its controllers. So we’ve got the the R1 and R2 buttons there, those shoulder buttons again. Nice close up of the Atari logo. Again we’ve got settings, we’ve got a credit button, so I guess this will be running some kind of arcade emulator, something similar to MAME, something like that, so you can actually insert credits to play the arcade games rather than having them kind of hacked and being on free play, stuff like that.
Nice authentic experience, very good to see. You’ve got your usual X, Y, and A and B buttons, nothing particularly noteworthy there. I think Atari are probably best known for their one button joystick stuff on most of their systems. The iconic CX 40 joystick, of course, only had the one button. But we do have, on the subject of controllers here, there’s a nice close up of these controller ports.
So these are USB C - and yeah, as you can see they’ve got pictures of little controllers next to them as well. So this is going to support external controllers. Will they be releasing a range of matching USB C controllers? That would be really cool to see because of course you could buy those and presumably they would work with other systems as well.
So, yeah, very excited about that. There was also an air vent in that shot. I don’t know if you spotted that. So I’m guessing this thing is going to have a fan inside it, be air cooled, which probably indicates perhaps a higher end SoC type system. I’m not quite sure. We have an SD card slot in the top, micro SD, so of course hopefully it will support being able to add your own games.
I don’t see why not. It’s got an HDMI port on the top which looks like a full size HDMI port so you can hook it up to your TV and actually play your games on your TV. So, similar deal to the Switch, I guess. You can use it as a handheld or as a TV console - and yeah, it’s just, it’s a really nice looking piece of hardware.
I know My Arcade are known, as I mentioned, for making quite decent hardware. So I’m quite hopeful about this. It looks like a really nice thing just sat there on the stand. Nice big screen on there as well. It looks like that’s potentially 16:9 aspect ratio rather than perhaps the 1:1 or 4:3 that you would have expected - hopefully stuff is kind of scaled properly.
It does make you wonder about some of the other potential features of this. So yeah, that is the GameStation Go. Very interesting looking little handheld console there, and looking forward to the official launch at at CES in a few days time. Hopefully some people will be getting their hands on with that, and it will be available immediately, but no further information on release date, or games, or supported systems, or anything like that at the moment.
So, watch this space!
Original Video Links
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Episode Links:
Atari Joystick Decanter Set: https://atari.com/products/atari-joystick-decanter-set
January 2024 Roundup Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB4FO-_i0UA
My Arcade: https://myarcade.com
GameStation Go Teaser Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbBSg9BifDI
CES 2025: https://www.ces.tech
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