8BitDo Marks the N64’s 30th With Wave Blue Gear You Can’t Use on a Switch

The Nintendo 64 turns 30 today, and 8BitDo has shown up to the party with a matching outfit. The company announced two N64-themed products in translucent Wave Blue: the Retro 87 mechanical keyboard at $99.99, and the Ultimate 2 controller at $59.99. Pricing went live June 23.

The design work is lovely if you grew up with the console. The Retro 87 keyboard leans into the callback hard, with yellow arrow keys standing in for the C-buttons, blue and green A and B keys, and a red CTRL, all under that see-through casing. The Ultimate 2 controller gets the matching Wave Blue shell and N64-colored ABXY face buttons, and underneath it is a thoroughly modern pad: TMR sticks, Hall Effect triggers, and a charging dock in the box. The keyboard starts shipping August 14.

Now the part that made me laugh. This is an N64 tribute that you cannot use to play N64 games on a Nintendo console. Both products are aimed at PC and mobile, the controller uses an Xbox button layout, and 8BitDo says it is not directly compatible with the Switch or Switch 2. So the 30th-anniversary N64 pad will not drive the actual N64 library sitting inside Nintendo Switch Online.

I will probably still want the keyboard. It looks great on a desk. But there is something very 2026 about celebrating a Nintendo console with hardware that politely refuses to talk to Nintendo’s.