I wore the £67,000 G-SHOCK that took Casio eight years to make, and the price isn’t even the wildest part

Casio G-SHOCK MRG-D5000 — (Image credit: Matt Kollat)

There are expensive watches, and then there’s the most expensive watch Casio has ever made. As part of the new Blue Rose collection, I got to spend some quality time with Casio’s new MRG-D5000 ahead of its launch today, and although that extraordinary price inevitably grabs your attention first, it quickly became one of the less interesting things about the watch.

The MRG-D5000 is the result of an eight-year engineering project built around a slightly ridiculous question: can you make a G-SHOCK out of sapphire crystal and still make it tough enough to be called a G-SHOCK?

Casio first showed a sapphire crystal concept back in 2018, but at the time it couldn’t meet the company’s shock-resistance requirements. As you might know, to earn the G-SHOCK moniker, a watch must adhere to the “Triple 10” development goal and survive a 10m drop, offer 10-bar water resistance and run for 10 years on a battery.

Making sapphire behave like a G-SHOCK

Sapphire makes perfect sense for a high-end watch in some respects. It’s extremely hard, highly scratch-resistant and, in the case of the MRG-D5000, looks spectacular. However, the problem is that hardness isn’t the same thing as toughness.

Sapphire can be brittle, which creates an obvious headache when your entire brand is built around watches designed to survive being knocked, dropped and generally abused.

Casio’s solution was to rethink the structure of the watch itself. Instead of treating the bezel and outer case as single pieces, the Multi-Guard Structure divides them into separate interacting components designed to absorb and disperse impact.

More interestingly, Casio says the construction is inspired by a traditional Japanese timber-frame technique called kigumi. Whereas traditional watch cases concentrate stress around screw holes, which can be weak points in something as unforgiving as sapphire, the parts on the MRG-D5000 use interlocking forms to fit together.

As expected, creating an all-sapphire watch is a very involved process. Casio told me it had to create new machinery and manufacturing processes during development, while the sapphire itself takes months to grow.

Only sections with the required colour concentration and transparency are selected before the individual components are shaped to help prevent chipping. The result is a translucent blue case that changes quite dramatically depending on the light. Casio confirms that the sapphire begins as ingots grown over several months, after which suitable sections are selected.

In my hands, the MRG-D5000 felt both very G-SHOCK and strangely delicate. Knowing that there are only a handful of watches of this calibre in existence, you can’t help but treat the watch carefully, even though, in the back of your mind, you know you could probably throw it to the other side of the room without it as much as getting scratched.

The sapphire case with its titanium core gives the watch a nice G-SHOCK heft. The blueness of the material really twinkles in the light as you turn it, giving it an almost ethereal look and feel. I must confess, the sapphire attracted fingerprints quite well, but I assume whoever will be the proud owner of the watch won’t let a bunch of people touch it.

Speaking of people touching the MRG-D5000, I wondered how the battery will be changed if sapphire doesn’t like being tampered with, and I was reassured the watch won’t ever need a battery change thanks to the panels that harvest not just sunlight but any light source imaginable.

The strangest G-SHOCK I’ve held

What surprised me most is that, despite all the engineering and all the money involved, the MRG-D5000 still unmistakably looks like a square G-SHOCK. Casio hasn’t tried to disguise the watch's origins by turning it into a conventional luxury timepiece (even though some MR-G models do a very good job at that).

You still have the familiar brick-pattern face inherited from the original G-SHOCK, only here it’s given a blue vapour-deposition finish. The MR-G logo, Shock Resist marking and other lettering are rendered in 24-carat gold, while the rear uses a Grade 5 titanium screw caseback with another piece of blue sapphire crystal set into it.

Even the strap received special attention. Casio developed a new Dura Soft rubber strap, with its raised pattern again referencing the brick motif seen on the original G-SHOCK.

The watch I handled was numbered 000, making it effectively a pre-production/showpiece model and not the one customers will receive. The production run consists of just 20 examples, numbered individually from 001 to 020. And yes, there is a 007 MRG-D5000, which I’m sure will delight at least some people.

Twenty watches (but surely not twenty watches’ worth of engineering)

Casio has spent eight years solving problems around sapphire construction, developing new manufacturing methods, re-engineering its shock-resistant structure and creating dedicated components for a production run of only 20 watches.

Maybe that's the end of the story, but I find that difficult to believe. Casio hasn't said whether the machinery, material expertise or structural ideas developed for the MRG-D5000 will appear elsewhere, and there's no suggestion yet that we're suddenly going to see affordable sapphire G-SHOCKs.

Still, it would be remarkable for all that R&D to lead nowhere beyond these 20 examples. The history of the project already hints at how ideas can migrate. Casio says the work on dividing the case into multiple components eventually informed the Multi-Guard Structure used on the titanium MRG-B5000 in 2022 before being further developed for sapphire here.

So although very few people will ever own the MRG-D5000, elements of what Casio learned creating it could potentially prove far more significant.

Thankfully, Blue Rose doesn’t start at £67,000

The MRG-D5000 also isn't the only watch in Casio's new Blue Rose Project. Below it sits the MRG-B5000SA-2, created to celebrate MR-G's 30th anniversary, using two two-carat blue sapphires with a custom eight-facet cut, along with a COBARION top bezel and Grade 5 titanium components. Only 500 of this model will be produced.

One step down is the considerably more attainable GMW-B5000SB-1A2, which features four round brilliant-cut blue sapphires set in the bezel, paired with a black ion-plated stainless-steel case, an inverted LCD and a black urethane strap.

All three retain the fundamentals you'd expect from the brand, including G-SHOCK shock resistance, 20-bar water resistance, solar power and radio-controlled timekeeping.

The MRG-D5000 costs £67,000 and is limited to 20 pieces worldwide, while the MRG-B5000SA-2 costs £7,600 and is limited to 500. The GMW-B5000SB-1A2 costs £680, making it by a wide margin the easiest way into Casio's Blue Rose Project.

Head over to Casio for more information on the Blue Rose Collection (and to potentially buy one of the more affordable models).

Matt Kollat is a journalist and content creator for T3.com and T3 Magazine, where he works as Active Editor. His areas of expertise include wearables, drones, action cameras, fitness equipment, nutrition and outdoor gear. He joined T3 in 2019.

His work has also appeared on TechRadar and Fit&Well, and he has collaborated with creators such as Garage Gym Reviews. Matt has served as a judge for multiple industry awards, including the ESSNAwards. When he isn’t running, cycling or testing new kit, he’s usually roaming the countryside with a camera or experimenting with new audio and video gear.