8BitDo's Retro R8 Mouse Is A Perfect Complement To Your NES-Themed Keyboard

The Venn diagram of "quirky input hardware fans" and "retro gaming enthusiasts" is nearly a circle, so we're rock-solid confident that you will find this new mouse colorway from 8BitDo quite tantalizing indeed. The Retro R8 mouse isn't a new product, and the extant pointing device is already well-regarded, but now the company has introduced an "N Edition" that borrows its aesthetic from the original Nintendo NES.

The clever creators at 8BitDo have been skirting copyright rules for years now by borrowing the aesthetics of classic gaming hardware and then applying them to all-new modern controllers. 8BitDo is looked upon fondly among the many third-party controller makers because of its excellent quality control and pricing that remains affordable.


The Retro R8 - N Edition is a new color for the R8 mouse that released a couple of months ago. That's a good thing, because the Retro R8 kicks butt. It's an ambidextrous gaming mouse with a high-end Pixart PAW3395 optical sensor, offering DPI settings all the way up to a nonsensically-high 26,000 DPI, and polling rates up to 8KHz—although, as usual, you'll have to be using the 2.4GHz or wired options to enjoy such high report rates.

The battery is a 450mAh rechargeable unit, and the mouse includes a charging dock so you don't even have to worry about fumbling with a charging wire. 8BitDo puts the Retro R8 mouse down for a 100-hour use time on Bluetooth and likely a bit less than that with the 2.4GHz dongle thanks to the higher polling rate.

Like most gaming mice, the Retro R8 is fully programmable, and 8BitDo offers its own software to let you remap the buttons, write macros, and so on and so forth. If you've bought a gaming mouse, you know the drill.

Of course, this isn't just any gaming mouse; the reason you'd buy this thing is for the aesthetic. It's not hard to see the NES' influence, not only in the color scheme but even in the design; if we didn't know better, we'd think the N Edition was the original version. That honor goes to the version in Xbox colors, though. This version is instead perfectly paired with the N Editions of 8BitDo's excellent Retro keyboards:

Your author has the 87 key version, and our very own editor Paul Lilly has the 107-key version, too. They're fantastic mechanical keyboards that we can easily recommend. If you're keen on a slick new keyboard, you could do a lot worse than an 8BitDo keyboard. Just be advised that the Kailh Box White V2 switches are the loud, clicky type, like Cherry MX Blue (but with a lighter actuation force of 45g, similar to MX Red).


Both of these accessories are available in the Xbox colors, as we noted, and they're officially-licensed accessories, too. Let us know if you own any 8BitDo input hardware in the comments!