Palmer Luckey Is Now Selling a Game Boy

Suppose you’ve been biting your bottom lip for years waiting for the Game Boy-like Analogue Pockets to return in stock. In that case, there’s another company set to release another handheld to play your old cartridges natively without any emulation hassle. ModRetro now has its $200 Chromatic not-Game Boy available for preorder. At first glance, it seems like a shoo-in for the retro handheld scene. Unfortunately, buying one also means supporting one of the more controversial figures in tech: Palmer Luckey.

The ModRetro Chromatic looks like a very strong competitor for the retro console handheld boom. It has a backlit 160×144 display with a scratch-resistant synthetic sapphire screen cover and a magnesium alloy shell. It’s compatible with Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and “Chromatic” cartridges, the latter being a selection of indie homebrews explicitly made for the new handheld. ModRetro says the Chromatic should support FPGA emulation, a kind of hardware replication that should play original cartridges as they were meant to be played.

It also has a link cable port, an IR receiver for those who want to trade their Pokémon in person, and a small modern amenity with a USB-C video out. Yet it’s still powered with three AA batteries. To top it off, it also has a special Tetris version.

It looks the part whether you get it in some bright, evocative colors with a few stripes running down its bottom left corner. Unfortunately, you’d have to give money to a Palmer Luckey-run company to get your hands on one.

There are a fair few reasons not to wish to support Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. His current company, Anduril, is a U.S. military contractor that has worked on drones and autonomous military aircraft. He has a history of supporting far-right and fringe politics, going so far as to promote a so-called “virtual border wall” back during the administration of President Donald Trump. That’s even before you get into the strained relationship with Meta (then Facebook), eventually leading to his departure.

In a video posted by the once-Oculus CEO, Luckey claims the Chromatic has an “identical pixel structure” to the Game Boy Color display, replicating the odd colors you’d see on the original Nintendo handhelds. Bedecked in his messy chinstrap beard, wavy mullet, and Hawaiian shirt, he also claimed they wanted “the best” device even if it “doesn’t make sense from a money-making perspective.”

Luckey said on his blog that he has been working on modded Game Boys for 17 years. ModRetro was an online forum he started before starting Oculus VR. Before blowing up the VR scene and becoming an awkwardly controversial figure in tech, he added LED backlights to the Game Boy Pocket. He called the Chromatic “an uncompromisingly authentic celebration of everything that made the console special.”

If you don’t care about Luckey’s checkered past, then at the very least, you don’t have to compromise on putting the $200 on a ModRetro Chromatic. It’s up for preorder now and it’s supposed to be available by Christmas and sold at GameStop and through the company’s webstore.