Razer Boomslang 20th Anniversary Mouse Review: For Collectors

Unique throwback design. Top-of-the-line specs. PU leather-wrapped body. Ambidextrous shape with mirrored buttons. Wireless charging. Includes an exploded mouse in a backlit frame.

Absurd price. Shape doesn’t feel great if you aren’t nostalgic for it. 100-plus grams. No Bluetooth connectivity. No USB charging or wired connectivity.

The Razer Boomslang 20th Anniversary Edition gaming mouse costs over one thousand dollars. $1,337, to be specific.

I was surprised. Everyone I mentioned this to was surprised. Even the Razer representative hosting the press conference seemed surprised. It’s not made of gold. It doesn’t even have real leather on the leather-wrapped components. It’s a plastic-based polyurethane leather, attached to a transparent plastic shell. For $1,337.

According to Razer, you aren’t paying just for the throwback shape. You’re paying for the prestige of what the brand calls the “exotic supercar of mice.” It’s something they admit will be, for most buyers, a display piece more than an actual, functional mouse—they even send you a framed, broken-down version with each functional mouse.

Is there any actual reason to spend this money on a “leet” mouse that looks like a Ghost from Halo and comes with a display case? For many, there was; I received this mouse only a day before preorders started, and the 1,337 units sold out almost immediately. If you want one now, you’re likely going to be stuck spending nearly $2,000 on the aftermarket.

Clickable History

There couldn’t be a better time for Razer to release a reimagined version of its first mouse: The transparent, rounded, and futuristic designs of the early 2000s have swung back around to being cool in the public eye, and a retro mouse like this (as much as it hurts to call this “retro”) is exactly the kind of thing I expected every brand to be pushing for.

The Razer Boomslang was originally released in 1999, making this a bit late for the “20th Anniversary” it’s supposedly celebrating. The Razer brand was first founded as a subsidiary of Kärna LLC in 1998, shutting down only two years later when Kärna filed for bankruptcy. The brand was revived five years later, rereleasing the Boomslang as the new Razer’s debut mouse and establishing the 20th Anniversary in question.

Razer claims the Boomslang to be the first gaming mouse ever made. It introduced a 2,000 DPI sensor, gaming-focused shape, and precise functionality that was previously unheard of in gaming (but if you ask me, any mouse can be a gaming mouse when you use it for gaming).

While “Boomslang” may sound like the name of a bomb-lobbing slingshot from a Borderlands game, I was shocked to learn that it’s actually the name of a venomous green-and-black snake native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Translated from Dutch and Afrikaans, the name quite literally means “tree snake.” The coloration and snakes’ head shape presumably served as inspiration for the shape of the mouse and its transparent green colorway.

Even the pricing is a not-very-subtle reference. For those that weren’t online back in the day, “1337” is an example of “leetspeak,” which consists mostly of replacing letters with numbers and modifying the spelling of certain phrases, either to evoke more-specific meanings or bypass text filters. “1337” was “LEET,” which was an intentional misspelling of “elite,” and being the first half of “1337 H4X0R,” a ridiculous way to write “elite hacker,” since being a hacker was the coolest thing possible in the Matrix era.

Ancient Ergonomics

This mouse’s shape is over two decades old. In the interim, mouse ergonomics have advanced a lot. Because of that, I don’t think it’s realistic to hold this design to the standards of today.

The original Boomslang came from the era of Xbox’s bulky Duke controller. We had just barely made it past the N64’s beloved three-pronged abomination. At a time when “ergonomics” was a novel idea to be explored instead of a defined concept, this design was a lot more palatable.

It’s still a gaming mouse in theory, even if the vast majority of them will spend more time on a shelf than on a mousepad, so I do need to talk about whether it can game. Shockingly enough, it’s not that bad. The shape is unusual, yes. Compared to a standard mouse, the Boomslang is low-slung and wide. It feels like it was designed for an Elite from Halo to hold, their two central fingers and a thumb on each side. It is bizarre and ancient feeling, but it’s not bad.

Putting your hand on this mouse, you have to rethink where everything goes. Your thumb curls underneath the main hump, and your pinky mirrors it on the opposite side. There’s enough real estate on the two main buttons for all three fingers to sit comfortably. If you’re like me, and you tend to rest your middle finger on the right mouse button, it’s exceptionally odd. Instead, your middle finger really wants to rest on the mouse wheel. It feels natural after a few minutes, but you'll need to adjust.

To properly test this mouse, I paired it with some of the heavy hitters from back in the day. Halo CE, Counter-Strike, Quake 2, and Half-Life. To get any agility, your hand is pretty much forced into a fingertip-only grip, where your thumb and pinky slide into the crevices of the side buttons for added stability. The mouse wheel is set fairly far back compared to a standard mouse, so putting your fingertips at the edge of the mouse means your middle finger can’t easily use the mouse wheel. Instead, with your fingertips sitting directly next to the wheel, the palm of your hand is left hanging off the back. I would imagine everyone who uses this will have a newfound appreciation for how far ergonomics have come over the years.

The largest struggle I had with this mouse was fine controls. The large head and weight means this is slightly more prone to maintaining momentum than most that I’ve tested, wanting to swing around like a battle axe when being used precisely.

The truly strangest aspect of this mouse from a modern perspective is the side buttons. They sit in what I can best describe as the “armpits” of the mouse, curving underneath the front section and sitting exactly where your thumb and pinky intuitively want to be. Both of them have a strange, creased shape that follows the lines of the mouse’s two halves, and require a good bit of force to be pressed down, meaning you won’t accidentally press them during regular use, but this also means they’re easy to forget about.

Technically speaking, this mouse is ambidextrous. It is mirrored from left to right, with the same shape and buttons on both sides. However, I really think “ambidextrous” is a stretch for what this mouse is: It feels equally awkward in both hands more than anything else.

Modern Internals

Yes, it performs well. It has the same internal assembly as the latest Deathadder, with Gen-4 optical switches and 8,000-Hz polling. There’s no question that this mouse is on par with most brands’ premium lightweight offerings today.

While the weight is not on par with other offerings at nearly 108 grams, it really doesn’t feel that heavy: The massive footprint combined with the low height means the weight is fairly easy to move around. Even if it doesn’t feel anywhere near as light as a modern gaming mouse that’s below 60 grams, it’s certainly not as sluggish as a productivity-focused mouse like the MX Master 4.

Really, the most enjoyment I derived from this mouse was the feeling of playing early-2000’s games with it. Swinging the mouse around in Quake 2 felt not great, but fun. The same can be said for a playthrough of Halo: Combat Evolved or a CS2 death match lobby. I didn’t perform well in any of these, but I did have a pretty good time while experiencing a weird sense of physical nostalgia.

Rebuilding an Old Mouse

While I was initially surprised by the choice to use artificial PU leather instead of actual leather, my conversation with Charlie Bolton, Razer’s lead designer, revealed that there were reasons behind this. Along with issues of longevity and maintenance, Bolton pointed out that some religions look down on owning and handling items made of leather. While I see real leather as a more “premium” offering within my own cultural context, I can understand their decision from this perspective, since it makes the product accessible to a larger audience.

Even fake leather is better than the soft-touch plastic used on the original Boomslang. During our meeting, Bolton showed off a grossly sticky and degraded original model. I, like many, loathe soft-touch plastic’s inevitable march towards that weird, tacky texture.

While the plastic shell might feel a bit underwhelming compared to Razer’s magnesium mouse from a few years back, or Corsair’s carbon-fiber offerings, I can understand this choice as well: The mouse really wouldn’t feel the same with an opaque shell. During a meeting with Razer’s lead designer, he showed me a prototype with an all-black shell that didn’t have the same charm to it, and told me that, while they had experimented with Magnesium at first, it just didn’t feel authentic either. Having the mouse in-hand, I really like the look of the transparent plastic.

When talking to Bolton, I also asked whether the price was because of the collectors’ premium, or because of the custom tooling needed for a limited-run, low-demand product like this. “A mix of both” was the answer I got. Most injection-molded plastic products are dependent on large-scale production runs to offset the price of development. When there are only a couple thousand items being made instead of tens or hundreds of thousands, the price of each individual mouse will naturally shoot up exponentially. Add in the fact that all of the leather surfaces are hand-stitched, and integration of wireless charging, and you have a mouse that certainly was not inexpensive to produce.

To further the assertion that this mouse is a collectors’ item, and not just a mouse, you get quite a bit more than “just” the mouse in the package. A week after I received the mouse, a second package arrived at my door: a massive frame with all of the parts needed to assemble another Boomslang on display, mounted with LED backlighting. This is, of course, just as absurd as the rest of the mouse. But, ironically enough, it also manages to address my largest gripe with most devices today: a lack of repairability. While Razer recommends against it, I confirmed that all of these parts are fully functional and can theoretically be used for repairs! Huzzah! (There are even exposed screws on the back of the frame!)

A Collector's Item

Is it worth buying one? With the Boomslang, though, that’s not really a question. It's clearly not worth the money as simply a mouse. There is no way any mouse, from a performance or functionality perspective, can be worth $1,337, or anything near it. It is not a “good deal” by any means. It’s not even a sensible way to spend the money.

More than anything else, this is a collectors’ item: The value it provides is not based on any kind of functionality, or usability, but is instead in the cultural space it occupies. For wealthy nerds who recall the early Razer mice from their LAN parties, this is more a piece of art than an actual device to use. For many buyers it represents both nostalgia for the “simpler” times of one’s youth and prestige and exclusivity at the same time. I am sure a myriad of video game streamers would love to have one of these behind them in the LED backlit frame.

Yes, this mouse is deeply, deeply absurd. But how much more absurd is the rest of the status quo? There is a huge culture of limited-run, artificially-scarce products that sell for significantly more than they are worth, and there are obvious critiques to be lobbed at all of them, this mouse included.

I am not saying to go out and buy a ridiculous, expensive mouse. But I am saying we might see more and more of these tech products as millennials age and get wealthier. There are so many fields that seemingly get a pass on ridiculous, aspirational pricing, and it seems that this will also spill over to technology products in more ways. I don’t think an everyday mouse should cost this much, but I also don’t think this is an everyday mouse. As a collectors’ item, I can let it be.