Palmer Luckey’s Nostalgic Gaming Side Hustle Is About to Become a Unicorn
One might know Palmer Luckey as the 33-year-old CEO of Anduril, the defense tech company with close ties to the U.S. government, or as the prodigy who sold Oculus VR to Facebook at just 21. Luckey’s entrepreneurial journey began even earlier—with ModRetro, a venture he launched as a teenager in Long Beach that has grown from an online forum for video game console modifications into a gaming startup nearing unicorn status.
ModRetro is in talks for a new funding round that could value the company at $1 billion, the Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. That would mark a major milestone for the startup, which sells modernized versions of classic gaming consoles. ModRetro did not respond to requests for comments from Observer.
At first glance, a retro gaming company might seem like a curious side project for a defense tech executive. But Luckey has never fit the typical Silicon Valley mold. Instead of fleece vests and minimalist sneakers, he’s often seen in Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops and board shorts. A devoted gamer, Luckey has even tried to acquire large private video game collections and reportedly stores his own underground in a decommissioned nuclear missile base.
ModRetro released its first product, the ModRetro Chromatic, in 2024. Priced at $199, the handheld console pays tribute to the Nintendo Game Boy, matching its vintage design while remaining compatible with original Game Boy titles. According to a blog post by Luckey, he spent 17 years developing the “ultimate Game Boy-inspired device” before finalizing the design.
While Luckey built Oculus and Anduril, ModRetro evolved alongside them from a niche forum into a fully fledged startup. The company is now led by former Anduril and Oculus engineer Torin Herndon and most recently raised $19 million in 2024.
Luckey first broke into the mainstream in 2014, when he sold Oculus, his virtual reality headset company, to Facebook (now Meta) for $2 billion. After a few years at Facebook, he founded Anduril, which develops autonomous defense technologies and counts the U.S. Department of War among its major clients. The company was valued at $30.5 billion last year and is reportedly in discussions to nearly double that figure to $60 billion, according to the Financial Times.
If Anduril is Luckey’s professional calling, ModRetro is his passion project—rooted less in profit and more in nostalgia. As he put it during an October appearance on the TBPN podcast, “As the games industry has financialized and gotten much bigger, there’s a lot of things that have gotten lost. The need to make more and more money has taken things away from what I think were actually great product decisions in the 80s and 90s.”
Next up for ModRetro: a reimagined version of the Nintendo 64, the beloved console discontinued in the early 2000s, set to debut soon in four colorways.