It took just 24 hours for the ModRetro Chromatic to sell out when it launched in December 2024. An unapologetic Game Boy clone packaged in a slick, tough new shell, it delivered the perfect dose of gaming nostalgia alongside a few modern upgrades. Keen to build on that success, ModRetro has revamped production efforts and rejiggered its supply chain to make sure the Chromatic can stand the test of time. Now the snazzy, geeky gadget is available for sale again—this time with new features, new games, and a brand-new colorway.
The company, helmed by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, says this time there will be no shortages of the Chromatic. It’ll cost you $199 with no games, or $299 for a version with a beefier sapphire crystal screen. More than that, Luckey wants the device to last, basically forever. Maybe even become the Game Boy’s final form.
Courtesy of ModRetro
“In theory, you could put this in a box for a hundred years and then pop in a pair of batteries and it would just go,” says Luckey. “If you’re saying this is going to be the last Game Boy ever made—that this is the thing that will persist and be the way you experience that whole era of gaming—you better make something to last. It’s almost like you have a moral duty to make sure it’s something that is going to survive.”
Luckey, Silicon Valley’s preeminent Hawaiian-shirt-clad tech bro, is famous—or infamous, depending on how you look at it—for pioneering VR tech and military defense alike. In 2012 he created the Oculus Rift, the product that effectively gave life to the then merely theoretical VR industry. He’s had a controversial journey since then, selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014, then leaving in an acrimonious split three years later. He moved on to start the military-industrial tech company Anduril (named after a sword from the Lord of the Rings series) that now makes attack drones, border surveillance tech, and AI-powered weapons.
His right-wing political leanings, while once out of favor in Silicon Valley, are now on display much more freely by the broader tech elite. Luckey has recently been re-embraced by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (née Facebook), in his own rightward turn. Another of Luckey’s recent endeavors, a crypto bank called Erebor (after the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit), is being funded by conservative billionaire and fellow LoTR nomenclature enthusiast Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir.
On another front, Luckey is still very into the tech of the past. The name ModRetro comes from a forum Luckey created as a kid to interact with other gadget enthusiasts. The thing that stuck with him the most from his childhood was the Game Boy.
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