The billionaire war drone maker, Palmer Luckey, has made a billion-dollar bet that he can make people care about the Game Boy again.
The founder of Anduril Industries, which builds AI-powered weapons for the Pentagon, is raising funds for his venture, ModRetro, which wants to develop and sell updated versions of classic 1990s consoles.
People familiar with the matter say Luckey is in talks with investors about backing the business at a $1bn valuation, as it lines up devices, including a machine that recreates the Nintendo 64.
ModRetro launched its first device in 2024, called the Chromatic, which copies Nintendo’s Game Boy look and ships bundled with the popular puzzle video game Tetris.
Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey wrote: “I have been working on making the ultimate Game Boy-inspired device off and on as a hobby for almost seventeen years now. It is, put simply, my ultimate tribute to the beautiful form, technical excellence, and cultural impact of the Nintendo Game Boy.”
Luckey co-founded Anduril in 2017 after leaving Facebook, which had bought his virtual reality headset business, Oculus, for $2bn in 2014, when he was 21.
Anduril’s success, backed by prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel and named after a sword in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, has made Luckey one of Silicon Valley’s best-known entrepreneurs.
A uniform of a Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops and a mullet means Luckey is among the most recognisable, which is handy when you are selling killer robots by day and retro toys by night.
ModRetro was the name of Luckey’s first business, an internet forum he started as a teenager that drew “hardware hackers combining vintage game consoles with modern technology. ”
