One might know Palmer Luckey as the 33-year-old CEO of Anduril, a defense technology company with close ties to the US government, or as the prodigy who sold Oculus VR to Facebook when he was just 21 years old. Luckey’s entrepreneurial journey began even earlier — with ModRetro, a project he launched as a teenager in Long Beach that has evolved from an online forum for video game console mods into a gaming startup approaching unicorn status.
ModRetro is in talks about a new funding round that could The company is valued at $1 billionAccording to the Financial Times, citing sources familiar with the matter. This would mark a major milestone for the startup, which sells modern versions of classic gaming consoles. ModRetro did not respond to requests for comment from the Observer.
At first glance, the retro gaming company might seem like an intriguing side project for a defense technology executive. But Lucky never fit the typical Silicon Valley mold. Instead of simple sweaters and sneakers, he is often seen wearing Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops, and shorts. Lucky, a loyal gamer, has reportedly tried to acquire large collections of private video games He stores himself Underground in a decommissioned nuclear missile base.
ModRetro released its first product, the ModRetro Chromatic, in 2024. Priced at $199, the handheld console pays homage to the Nintendo Game Boy, true to its retro design while maintaining compatibility with the original Game Boy titles. According to a blog post by Lucky, he spent 17 years developing “Game Boy inspired deviceBefore completing the design.
While Luckey built Oculus and Anduril, ModRetro evolved alongside them from a niche forum to a full-fledged startup. The company is now led by former Anduril and Oculus engineer Torin Herndon, and recently raised $19 million in 2024.
Lucky 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 self-defense technologies and counts the US War Department among its main clients. The company was valued at $30.5 billion last year, and is said to be in discussions to nearly double that number to $60 billion, according to the Financial Times.
If Anduril is Luckey’s professional goal, ModRetro is his passion project — one with roots less in profit and more in nostalgia. As he put it during an October appearance on the TBPN podcast, “As the gaming industry has become financialized and much larger, a lot of things have been lost. The need to make more and more money took 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 that ceased production in the early 2000s, and is set to debut soon in four colors.
