More than 25 years ago, the original Boomslang was released. It was
revolutionary as the first real gaming
mouse at the time. Sure, it sucked. It
was a ball mouse, and in 2025, well, not 2025, and in 2026,
uh you do not want to use a ball mouse for a number of reasons, but here, 27
years later, Razer has celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Boomslang uh by
re-releasing a special edition of the mouse. See, celebrating the 20th
anniversary is a little confusing because the mouse originally came out in
1999, and actually was discontinued in 2007 when the Deathadder started kind of
eating its lunch. Um they re-released it around that time, so I guess that's what
they're celebrating, but maybe I'm getting my details wrong, but you guys can let me know in the details below.
But in the box, one of two boxes you get, we'll look at the other after, you
get a genuinely very cool-looking mouse.
I think this whole product is a little absurd, but this mouse is undeniably uh
pretty freaking cool. We got transparent green, although it's a very different
hue of green than the original, um but we have this leatherette
uh sort of finish elsewhere, and so it's just a very unique
uh looking device, especially the shape. They do not make gaming mice that look
like this, uh and maybe for good reason. Elsewhere
in the box, we have our 8,000 kHz compatible dongle as well as our mouse's
only way of charging wirelessly. There's actually no ports, not a single one.
So, you need this dongle, don't lose it. Although, if you lose this, uh I think
you're trying to lose it. Other than that, we have a very premium green and
black six-ish foot cable. Um this is
about as nice as they make USB-C cables. Holy. I haven't even commented on the
case itself. This is like a collector's
item in itself. It's got like a leatherette exterior. It all goes
together nicely. Lastly, we have our
quick start guide, which includes stickers.
More importantly in here, we have extra glide skates cuz that freaking rocks.
This is a really wide glide skate.
That's because the front of this mouse is so exceptionally wide it makes sense.
But seeing it separated from the mouse is just kind of weird. Ah man, I wish
there was a way I could see all the components of this mouse just separated
from the mouse itself. Thankfully, Razer thought of that. We
have our second box, which is our
admittedly really cool blown-up
mouse with all the parts kind of separated.
You can see, you know, our chassis, we got our PCB,
sensor, we got our wireless charging coil, our skates. I think this is a
really neat addition when you're selling a super premium mouse.
However, I expect that this is a significant driver in the cost of this
product. Normally, we save the price of what we're unboxing for the end because
we don't want to scare you away. We want We want you to judge a product on its
own merits and then decide if it's worth it based on that price. However, this is
a special edition. And when I say special edition, I mean as special edition as
limited as they come. They made 1,337
of these. That's leet, spelled the numbers for you
younglings who might not know. And so, this premium product's package
that comes to you cost leet dollars,
1,337 dollars as well. I appreciate the
commitment to the meme, but I cannot
fathom spending anywhere close to that
on a mouse. I I didn't did did not spend that much on computers. This is cool
because this mouse you can use and this can be
displayed on your wall and I feel like if you're a streamer
who has a cool background, this might actually be something that you're more
interested in the mouse itself.
There is a light bar up here. Let's plug it in.
It's pretty nice. They include another one of these braided 6-ft cable. I
actually don't know if this is the right choice because this cable I want to be
invisible. So I might actually prefer just pure black, but it's really nice
and the light bar at the top is green. I think this is a good little
package. I think I would have preferred if it was more spread out as if it was a
mouse that was being kind of blown apart and the parts were kind of cascading
out. I think it'd be a more attractive look. However, this is much easier to
assemble and then get one of your pieces a little
crooked. Look at the sensor mouse gate.
That's that's a little offset. Someone off camera asked a great question.
Are these components working? Could you presumably build yourself a second
mouse? Maybe even sell it through to another buyer?
Uh the answer is I don't know. I presume that that is not
the case, but when you're charging uh
over $1,300 for a mouse, I guess you can afford to include the
parts for two working mice in there. Only Razer knows. Let's take a closer
look at this mouse itself. It's got the transparent green chassis all the way
around. I think that looks really good. It's a shame on the top you
can't really see electronics. You're kind of only peeking through a black
plastic, so it reduces the coolness factor a little bit. On the bottom you
get a little bit of a peek through at the PCB, but it is still pretty
um plain looking, so bit of a bummer, but uh you know, it is what it is.
This leather is not real leather and I
as a not particularly leather
>> [music] >> uh savvy person can tell, so um
let that inform your decision. On the top we have our two
ginormous buttons. These might be the biggest mouse buttons in existence. We
have our kind of skinny scroll wheel. Uh most scroll wheels these days are
um not quite rectangular, but they're not tapered off. Whereas this old-school
style of mouse scroll is very tapered.
And so that is not my preferred feeling, although it's totally fine in terms of
clickiness uh and tactility.
Um on the bottom, we have our DPI
switch, our on-off switch. We have all our PTFE skates. Uh we can see our
wireless coil. I guess that's the most electronic-looking thing we get to see.
We can also get a look at our uh proof that this is a one-of-one. Every single
one of the Boomslangs has a serial number 1 through 1337. Um but we have a
one-off Linus Tech Tips serial number. That's pretty cool. On the sides, we
have more leatherette. And then we have two kind of sneaky little side buttons.
And you know what? I like these side buttons. These are
hecka clicky and they're in a spot where like I can still move the mouse freely
without accidentally pressing, but easily accessible when my fingers
rest naturally on them. The question is, is this an ergonomic shape for the
modern gamer? And the answer is, no.
This is uh what people in 1999 thought performance
looked and felt like. We have come so far.
This is fine. It's uh the way I want to
grip it, so much of the mouse is extended out for
my fingers. I feel like I would lose so much control. It's not particularly
light, so I feel like it's not that good for whipping around. That being said, if
you are buying this uh to be your actual daily driver mouse,
you have a lot [music] of money. Too much, maybe, in fact. >> [laughter]
>> However, it does, at least on paper, have the stuff to be your daily driver.
It has the Focus Pro 45K Optical Sensor
Gen 2. These sensor names are >> [music]
>> getting more and more nonsensical, baby. Which means it's good for 45,000 DPI,
900 IPS, as well as 85G. That's way
faster than you're going to be moving your arm. And so, in terms of the specs,
this thing is way past overkill, uh as I would hope it is at that price point. Uh
and thankfully, it is actually an 8,000 Hz polling RATE
MOUSE. DAVID. THAT THAT DROP was a on purpose,
you know, I'm just testing the reliability of this mouse. These switches are rated for 100 million
clicks. Uh so, you know, you got to push the limit somehow.
Uh I can feel in the hand that it's not
particularly light, but it's uh Let's see what it actually weighs. 109
g. That's not, you know, the heaviest mouse we've ever tested here, but oh
boy, is that ever a lot heavier than the premium gaming mice I'm used to. The
skates that are The extra ones are actually glass skates, which is cool,
but then it's also like, if you want to put the glass skates on, you have to immediately discard these perfectly fine
PTFE ones. Should I swap them? I feel like it's so wasteful.
Oh, no. Didn't come off clean at all.
Now, let's do the thing I might be the worst at in the whole world, which is
steady hands.
Oh, yeah. That's smooth, baby. I think if you are someone who used the
Boomslang back in the day, this mouse shape might not be as horrendous as it
is for for me. You know what? I might be
coming around a little bit on this thing, but there's only one way to know for sure.
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One of my least favorite things in the whole entire world [music]
is installing Razer software. The way that like halfway through it's like,
"Oh, but you want this Razer software, too, right?" Oh, no, no, no, "You want this Razer software, too." No, I don't
want you. I don't want Chroma. I don't want any of it. I just want to look at
the controls for my freaking mouse. Now that we've installed our software, we
can appreciate that the dock it comes with has its own RGB. We can reassign
our buttons. We have our main button we can't reassign. We got our scroll click,
right click, scroll up, scroll down. We have our side buttons. We have our DPI
button. That's it. We have our Hypershift.
One thing that I haven't really mentioned is that this is a true ambidextrous mouse, which is actually
pretty cool for you left-handers out there. In terms of performance, we can
set our different DPI stages. I don't want anything but 800, please. We can
adjust our polling rate. By default, we're at 1,000 Hz, but we're going to go
to 8,000 because battery does not matter in this situation. We can also have a
smart polling rate switcher, uh which is pretty neat. So, when you
change to a game, it'll actually go to a higher polling rate. That's a good feature because most of the time,
honestly, 250 would be fine. When the original Boomslang peaked at 200 Hz, uh
250's not so bad. Uh we can test our brightness on our RGB
or turn it off like I will. And we got our calibration.
We can enable asymmetrical cut off which would allow us to have a different lift
off and landing distance. In terms of shape of the mouse, it is clearly
designed for the aesthetic, not for the hand. And that's fine, it's a
collector's item. Let's play a game.
This is a good performing mouse and one
of the worst form factors I've ever experienced. It feels like I'm holding a
kettlebell where the weight is like on the outside of my hand and I'm just like swinging it around. That being said,
it's snappy, it's responsive. Our Labs testing shows that it's a very
competitive mouse around 1.59 milliseconds of input latency which is
worlds better than the original Boomslang, although that was really good for its time, but still not gold
standard sub 1 millisecond. And so, it's not like your money's going to giving
you the best, most responsive mouse you can get, not even from Razer's own
lineup, so. The buttons all feel really good.
They're really clicky, they're kind of pingy sounding.
Which kind of makes me nostalgic for the bygone era of crappy gaming mice. These
side buttons rock. These might be my new favorite
side buttons on a mouse ever. Unfortunately, they're attached to a mouse that I would never ever pick. This
is clearly a product for people that are nostalgic for this monumental moment in
gaming where gaming peripherals were changed forever.
Um, and if you were there in '99 or 2007
as Razer wants to pretend like the Boomslang was first released. Uh,
power to you. Except that if you already missed your chance, no power to you,
haha. Uh, they're all sold out and they were sold out immediately and they're
selling for more on eBay because
that's what people do. They buy things not to enjoy them, but to sell them
through to people that do want to enjoy them.
So, while this is a cool nostalgic product that I think they did a pretty good job on and the extras make it a
more compelling package, I don't think you're really missing out on uh burning
$1,300 of your own money for this thing.
There's way better value gaming mice out there. There's the Keychron series.
There's Razer's own lineup. Even like their top-end stuff that's like $300. I
would way rather have that Viper Signature Mini. Way better overall
mousing experience. But, maybe other manufacturers are going to make mice
that we were nostalgic for. Uh there's like those Logitech ones or the
Microsoft ones back in the '90s uh that are not good mice, but you might have
fun memories of. And you know, who doesn't love indulging a
little nostalgia here and there? Just like uh who doesn't love watching
another ShortCircuit? Like the time I unboxed the Viper Mini Signature
Edition. That is still a premium mouse that is beyond what my budget is, but
dang that is a better mousing experience.