Awesome Retro

Do you have an Apple TV? Tired of staring at that boring black box sitting on your TV stand? Elago’s clever cover transforms Apple’s set-top streaming box into a retro gaming system. The Super Famicom-inspired silicone cover is strictly cosmetic, but it looks awesome. Elago also makes a matching cover for the Apple TV remote.

Musician Mick Mazz loves to reinterpret tracks and imagine what they might have sounded like if they came out in a different decade. His arrangement of the Oasis hit Wonderwall perfectly reworks the 1995 pseudo-Beatles track as a synth-heavy ’80s pop ballad.

Arcade1Up continues to build out its collection of retro-inspired video game cabinets with this stand-up system that lets four people play Pong at the same time. It also plays Warlords, Circus Atari, Tempest, Super Breakout, and a couple of other Pong variants. Pre-orders start shipping 4.1.2021.

Nike’s throwback sneaker embellishes a classic silhouette with an abstract swoosh logo made from red double zig-zag stitching. Its upper is made from white leather with grey suede accents, along with exposed foam tongues, and a translucent green rubber outsole. Coming in early 2021 to Nike.com and select retailers.

AtGames‘ value-priced gaming system features 100 licensed console and arcade games built right in. Simply plug it into any TV via its HDMI port, and connect a USB or Bluetooth game controller of your choice. AtGames is also offering a bundle of its Legends Ultimate arcade cabinet and Legends Core for $599 through 1.14.21.

First-person shooter games have been around in one form or another since the early 1980s. In this slick video from 4096, they seamlessly edited together footage from various FPSes, showing off the genre’s evolution while working in some impressive transitions to make it look like we’re watching a single game.

The personal computing revolution didn’t reach the masses until the 1980s, but back in the 1970s, a groundswell was forming among hardcore tech nerds. LGR takes a look back at a number of the unusual computer designs that emerged in the years leading up to the PC revolution.

Eight Minutes Upside Down has created a fantastic series of videos which explore the many tracks that sampled sounds from other musicians. In this episode, you’ll hear how electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk influenced artists from Beck to Sir Mix-a-Lot to The Chemical Brothers to Miley Cyrus.

Toymaker Super7 celebrates the 1988 John Carpenter classic They Live, putting on their special sunglasses to reveal the creepy ghouls living among us. The retro-style 3-3/4″ collection includes a man and a woman, along with limited edition OBEY and SUBMIT variants in black-and-white.

Take a few minutes out of your day and tune into Rob Landes‘ mega-medley, in which the violinist compiles 100 great pieces of music that chronicle the history of video game soundtracks. See how many you remember. That Crash Bandicoot theme gets us every time.

Inspired by 1980s boomboxes, but updated with modern audio tech, the Flare6 cranks out 150-watts of power via its three speakers. It offers 12 hours of wireless playtime, and has a 1/4″ microphone input, SD and USB ports for playing MP3 files, and five EQ settings. For even more power, check out the 200-watt Flare 8.

You don’t see vector-based video games these days, but there was something really cool about systems like the Vectrex and games like BattleZone. Electronics wiz Mixtela was longing for the days of vector graphics too, so he built himself an impressive little system, complete with game cartridges. More details here.

Guitarist FamilyJules revisits his epic metal medley of classic video game music, tossing in a few new games along the way, and bringing the end of the collection up to date. Yep. It still sounds to us like every character is about to run out of oxygen and lose a life.

Atari, working in collaboration with UNIS Technology, Ltd. is bringing back its 1970s arcade classic PONG. This tabletop gaming system has a 7.9″ LCD panel and offers both classic 2-player mode, and 1-player vs. AI mode. It runs on USB power or AAA batteries and is shipping in limited quantities now.

Unlike many other handheld retro systems, the Evercade plays licensed games, rather than pirated ROMs. Games play smoothly on its crisp 4.3″ widescreen, and come in collections on cartridges, another nice retro touch. The Premium Pack includes Atari, Data East, and Interplay carts packed with 8-bit and 16-bit games.

The electronic squeals of dial-up modems were truly unpleasant, but also brought us our earliest internet memories. If you’ve ever wondered what those sounds might look like on a graph, you’re in luck. Scotty H generated a spectrogram that shows the frequencies being generated during a moden’s handshake phase.