Thought to be dead, Mad Catz comes back to life in time for CES

Having declared bankruptcy last March, Mad Catz might as well have been a company that would have little to no shot of coming back. Fast forward to January, and here I am eating my words, since CNET confirmed that the peripheral maker is making a comeback.

The website confirmed with longtime company spokesperson Alex Verrey that Mad Catz will come back this year, with next week’s CES get-together set up as the revived company’s coming-out party. Verrey says Mad Catz’s return is thanks to a Chinese holding company that purchased its assets and branding.

According to Verrey, the new owner is focused on quality and not quantity, which means we should see less of whatever that was that Mad Catz showed off a few years back. Even so, new ownership means that Mad Catz has gone back to continue working on products it was forced to cancel due to the bankruptcy, and it’s even using the same factory tooling and parts as the old company.

Not everything is the same, however. For one, Mad Catz’s original design team was shipped off to Logitech in 2016 when the former was forced to sell its Saitek team to the latter. Verrey confirmed that the company is in talks with former employees and that it assembled a new internal design team in Asia, but it remains to be seen whether any of that means we still get to see the style of products we got from the Mad Catz of yore.

As for the products themselves, the company’s website was updated with eight mice, two keyboards, two headsets, and a few mousepads. Mad Catz is also making earbuds that are equipped with a boom mic, as well as the dangerous-looking Rat Pro X3 that features a swappable thumb rest, palm rest, pinkie rest, scroll wheel, and more.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, all of the products are PC peripherals. That is because, for the time being, Mad Catz is only selling PC gaming products, though that could change in the near future.

For now, Mad Catz looks to debut the products during CES next week and I can’t help but feel very happy about that.