Remember when you could see inside your Game Boy? Or your iMac? Or basically every piece of tech your parents told you was “too expensive to touch”? The early 2000s were absolutely obsessed with showing you the guts of things, and honestly, it ruled. Backbone apparently remembers too, because the new Xbox 25th Anniversary Edition of their Pro controller just raided the Controller S color archive and came back with three translucent shells that smell like 2002 in the best possible way.

Crystal Clear, Iconic Blue, and Bold Orange. Those aren’t made-up retro-adjacent names. Those are the actual original Xbox Controller S colorways, pulled straight from Microsoft’s retail catalog from back when controllers felt like objects worth bragging about. Backbone did their homework, and it shows.

Designer: Backbone

The Iconic Blue and Bold Orange units aren’t fully see-through. The grip bellies have a frosted, almost cloudy quality, and the plastic deepens where two layers of shell overlap, creating a subsurface glow effect that’s half-accidental, half-beautiful. The Bold Orange, particularly, looks backlit in direct light, the kind of amber warmth you’d get through sea glass. Crystal Clear is a different proposition entirely: genuinely transparent, every internal rib and screw boss visible, the trigger mechanism readable through the shell. Three colorways, three completely different personalities, all from the same tooling.

Every surface your hands actually contact is solid black. The thumbstick caps, the D-pad, the face buttons, the rear paddles, the trigger tips. Opaque, grounded, present. Everything else goes translucent and pulls back visually. It’s a simple call that makes the controller feel intentional rather than just see-through for novelty’s sake, your hands know exactly where to land, and the shell gets to be the art. The one exception is the Backbone button, which stays orange across all three colorways. On Bold Orange it vanishes completely into the shell; on Crystal Clear and Iconic Blue it’s a single warm accent, doing all the color work by itself.

The bridge connecting the two grips carries a fine perforated dot-matrix texture, the “BACKBONE” and “XBOX 25” co-branding, and a miniature Xbox sphere in place of the O. That whole wordmark sits on the one surface that disappears the second you dock a phone. Permanent branding, placed where only you see it. There’s something genuinely charming about that.

Hardware-wise this is the full Backbone Pro package underneath the anniversary paint: full-size ALPS thumbsticks, Hall Effect triggers, two remappable rear paddles, ultra-quiet face buttons, Bluetooth LE with FlowState one-press device switching, and dual batteries rated to 40 hours. USB-C wired or fully wireless, works across phones, tablets, PCs and TVs. The whole thing sits under 200 grams. No changes from the base Pro, which is absolutely fine when the base Pro is already regarded as the best thing you can strap to a phone for serious gaming.

The Backbone Pro Xbox 25th Anniversary Edition is $159.99, preorders are open now, and shipping kicks off in October 2026. It comes with a free month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and one gentle warning: it’s sold as a blind box, so the universe picks your color. All three are in equal production, all three look great, and the orange is objectively the most dramatic. Pick accordingly, or just roll the dice.

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