Arkade is a PC Peripheral That Transforms Every Modern Shooter Into a Light Gun Game

If you miss the days of Time Crisis, Virtua Cop, or even Duck Hunt, then Arkade Gaming Gun is a PC peripheral that should be firmly in your sights. At this week’s Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show 2026, I managed to get a short hands-on demonstration with this motion-controlled gun controller that’s due to release sometime in 2027 and came away with a strong first impression despite taking a few moments to wrap my head around its unique control setup.

What’s great about the Arkade Gaming Gun straight off the bat is that its proprietary technology doesn’t require a webcam or Wii-style sensor bar to make it work with your display. It’s completely plug and play, you connect its charging dock up to your PC via USB-C, and it doubles as a wireless receiver for the gun itself. A device manager allows you to customise its button layout and calibrate the tracking performance, and away you go.

You basically cradle the Arkade in a two-handed grip. The D-Pad or WASD-style movement of your character is handled by a thumbstick jutting out the side of its chunky barrel – which pulses with customisable LED graphics like a billboard in a Blade Runner skyline – with a pair of buttons on the other side used for other moves like jumping, and controls at the rear for weapon-switching.

Otherwise the actual aiming is handled by physically pointing the gun itself at your target, and that’s where things became initially disorientating during my brief hands-on. Dropped into a demo of Prodeus, a boomer shooter from developer Bounding Box Software, it took a moment for me to get comfortable with strafing and aiming at the same time. This was largely because to activate the aiming ability of Arkade you need to lightly grip the capacitive touch surface of its trigger. Rest your finger on the trigger and the onscreen crosshair will move to whatever target that you aim the gun at. Take your finger off the trigger, however, and you’re basically locked in the direction that you’re facing, as though you were playing with a mouse and keyboard and suddenly slipped your hand off the mouse.

Once I did get a feel for it, though, it largely became second nature. I even started instinctively re-centring myself on the fly with subtle movements of my trigger finger, not unlike when you’re aiming with a mouse and you’re pushing towards the edge of the mouse pad, and you pick it up and place it back in the middle without really thinking about it. It’s a fairly tricky thing to explain, but basically once it clicks it feels incredibly fun to peer down the Arkade’s sights and blaze away at a room of Doom-style demons with no noticeable compromises to the freedom of your movements. I especially like how its trigger features two stages of operation – a half-squeeze basically mimics a right mouse-button by zooming in slightly on your target, while a full squeeze fires the shot.

According to its creator and CEO Joshua Fuchs, the Arkade Gaming Gun isn’t solely designed for first-person shooters. Apparently it also supports a number of third-person shooters as well, from Fortnite to the Resident Evil 3 remake. It can also be used in conjunction with other peripherals to further increase the immersion, with Fuchs showing me a video example of one of his team members using the Arkade Gaming Gun in tandem with a racing wheel to execute drive-by shootings in Grand Theft Auto 5; one hand on the wheel and the other pulling the trigger on the Arkade. I’m not sure how much peripheral-juggling and custom controller-mapping would be required to play the entire game that way, but it certainly suggested that players could have a lot of fun getting creative with this device.

For now the Arkade gaming gun only supports PC, Mac, and Steam OS, but Fuchs has hopes of bringing it to consoles at some point in the future. The gun itself feels really solidly constructed, but light enough that I don’t imagine it would become too tiring to wield it for extended gaming sessions.

One thing that does feel a little heavy though, is the price. Arkade Gaming Gun is launching at $399 USD, although there is currently the option of scoring one at a discounted rate if you preorder from Arkade’s website. That’s a fairly hefty price to pay to bring a feeling of old school nostalgia to new school shooting, but if you’ve got the budget for it then based on my brief blast with it this light gun feels like it could be worth a shot.