Someone might know Palmer Luckey as the 33-year-old CEO of On the sensor, defense technology company with close ties to the US governmentor as a miracle that sold Oculus VR to Facebook at only 21 years old. Luckey’s entrepreneurial journey began even earlier—with ModRetro, a venture he started as a teenager in Long Beach that has grown from an online forum for video game console mods to a gaming startup approaching unicorn status.
ModRetro is in talks for a new round of funding that could value the company at $1 billionthe Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. This would mark a major milestone for the startup, which sells modernized versions of classic game consoles. ModRetro did not respond to requests for comment from the Observer.
At first glance, a retro gaming company might seem like a curious side project for a defense technology executive. But Luckey has never fit the typical Silicon Valley mold. Instead of woolen vests and minimalist sneakers, he is often seen in Hawaiian shirts, mats and shorts. A dedicated gamer, Luckey has even attempted to purchase large private video game collections and is said to have keeps 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 honors 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.
As Luckey built Oculus and Anduril, ModRetro evolved alongside them from a niche forum to a full-fledged startup. The company is now run by former Anduril and Oculus engineer Torin Herndon and 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 dollars. After several years at Facebook, he founded Anduril, which develops autonomous defense technologies and counts the US War Department among its top clients. The company was valued at $30.5 billion last year and is said to be in talks 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 said during an October appearance on the TBPN podcast, “While the gaming industry has been funded and become much bigger, there are many things that have been lost. The need to make more and more money has taken things away from what I think were really great product decisions in the 80s and 90s.
Next up for ModRetro: a reimagined version of the Nintendo 64, the beloved discontinued console of the early 2000s, set to debut soon in four colors.
