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The billionaire war drone maker Palmer Luckey has a new pitch for investors: a $1bn bet he can revive interest in the Game Boy.
The founder of Anduril Industries, which builds AI-powered weapons for the Pentagon, is raising funds for his venture, ModRetro, which plans to develop and sell updated versions of classic 1990s consoles.
According to people familiar with the matter, Luckey is in talks with investors about backing the business at a $1bn valuation as it prepares to launch devices including a machine that recreates the Nintendo 64.
ModRetro in 2024 launched its first device called the Chromatic, which is in the style of Nintendo’s Game Boy and comes bundled with the popular puzzle video game Tetris.
“I have been working on making the ultimate Game Boy inspired device off and on as a hobby for almost seventeen years now,” Luckey wrote in a 2025 blog post.
“It is, put simply, my ultimate tribute to the beautiful form, technical excellence, and cultural impact of the Nintendo Game Boy.”
Luckey co-founded Anduril in 2017 after he left Facebook, which had bought his virtual reality headset business, Oculus, for $2bn in 2014 when he was 21.
The success of Anduril, backed by prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel and named after a sword in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, has made him one of Silicon Valley’s best-known entrepreneurs; a uniform of Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops and a mullet means Luckey is also among the most recognisable.
Anduril sells drones and other autonomous weapons to the US military and its allies, taking on an oligopoly of contractors including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for a share of an industry worth trillions of dollars.
The company has capitalised on surging investment in defence technology and is in talks with investors about a major new funding round which could value it above $60bn, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
ModRetro was the name of Luckey’s first business, an internet forum he started as a teenager popular with “hardware hackers combining vintage game consoles with modern technology,” he wrote in the blog post.
The company will also produce games including remasters of classics and new titles. ModRetro did not respond to requests for comment.
