The ModRetro Chromatic Is a Game Boy Fit for Your Apocalypse Bunker

WIRED

10-07-2025

Jul 10, 2025 12:00 PM Palmer Luckey's sold-out, souped-up cartridge-only console clone is back—and this time, it wants to live forever.
It took just 24 hours for the ModRetro Chromatic to sell out when it launched December 2024. An unapologetic Game Boy clone packaged in a slick, tough new shell, it delivered the perfect dose of gaming nostalgia alongside a few modern upgrades. Keen to build on that success, ModRetro has revamped production efforts and rejiggered its supply chain to make sure the Chromatic can stand the test of time. Now, the snazzy, geeky gadget is available for sale again—this time with new features, new games and a brand new colorway.
The company, helmed by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, says this time there will be no shortages of the Chromatic. It'll cost you $199 with no games, or $299 for a version with a beefier sapphire crystal screen. More than that, Luckey wants the device to last, basically forever. Maybe even become the Game Boy's final form.
'In theory, you could put this in a box for a hundred years and then pop in a pair of batteries and it would just go,' says Luckey. 'If you're saying this is going to be the last Game Boy ever made—that this is the thing that will persist and be the way you experience that whole era of gaming—you better make something to last. It's almost like you have a moral duty to make sure it's something that is going to survive.'
Luckey, Silicon Valley's preeminent Hawaiian-shirt-clad tech bro, is famous—or infamous, depending on how you look at it—for pioneering VR tech and military defense alike. In 2012, he created the Oculus Rift, the product that effectively gave life to the then merely theoretical VR industry. He's had a controversial journey since then, selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014, then leaving in an acrimonious split three years later. He moved on to start the military industrial tech company Anduril (named after a sword from the Lord of the Rings series) that now makes attack drones, border surveillance tech, and AI-powered weapons.
His right-wing political leanings, while once out of favor in Silicon Valley, are now on display much more freely by the broader tech elite. Luckey has recently been re-embraced by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (née Facebook), in his own rightward turn. Another of Luckey's recent endeavors, a crypto-bank called Erebor (after the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit ), is being funded by conservative billionaire and fellow LoTR nomenclature enthusiast Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir.
On another front, Luckey is still very into the tech of the past. The name ModRetro comes from a forum Luckey created as a kid to interact with other gadget enthusiasts. The thing that stuck with him the most from his childhood was the Game Boy.
The Chromatic isn't the only Game Boy replacement out there. Nintendo has a collection of classic Game Boy games available to download (for a price). You can find emulators online. There are devices like Analogue Pocket that aim to recreate the experience of a physical Game Boy and even offer more games to play. Luckey says that while those efforts are all good, they come with compromises that he wants to blow right past.
'If something is worth doing, it's worth someone in the industry doing it right,' Luckey says.
If you can get past that baggage of a fun gadget being tied to an arms dealer, reviews of the first edition of the Chromatic make the device sound very good.
As a handheld gaming device, the ModRetro Chromatic harkens back to nostalgia of the early '90s Game Boy era, albeit housed in a case that is built like a bomb shelter. With the heft of a graphing calculator, the Chromatic leans into the chonkiness of early gaming handhelds, albeit with some much more modern upgrades. The gadgetry within is housed in a lightweight magnesium alloy chassis, assembled in a clamshell format that is meant to be straightforward to take apart. The screens are protected with Gorilla Glass, or you can opt for the scratch-resistant sapphire crystal surface for an extra $100. The buttons are made of satisfyingly clicky metals. The screws, though still the less common tri-wing screws found in early Game Boys, are easy enough to take out and replace.
According to Torin Herndon, the lead engineer at ModRetro who has worked with Luckey at Anduril and Oculus, repairability and the ability to fix or tweak the device were paramount.
'The idea is to preserve it for multiple generations down the line, so what we had to do was make the device as deserving of that as possible,' Herndon says. 'And then to architect the device in a way that is really going against the grain of planned obsolescence.'
For that reason, the console exclusively plays cartridge games, just like its progenitor. There are no digital downloads, though game makers can issue bug fixes or updates if connected to the internet. Accessories for the Chromatic include rechargeable battery packs, cables, and a headset range in cost from $15-$50. You can also buy a dedicated modification kit which lets you take apart the device and alter it as you see fit.
On the library front, the Chromatic has launched with 15 games you can buy, and a special version of Tetris created by ModRetro comes packaged with the device. ModRetro has teased future partnerships for games made with industry stalwarts like Ubisoft, Atari, and Argonaut Games. Otherwise, if you want to play a game, you'll have to find a second-hand Game Boy or Game Boy Color cartridge somewhere. The Chromatic is backwards compatible, so old Game Boy games should work, assuming you've blown on the cartridge enough to get the dust out, of course.
Despite the retro-focus, the Chromatic has a few new tricks wired into it as well. A USB-C port can be used for charging or for piping live video directly from the Chromatic to streaming services via Mac, PC, and Discord. That means you can stream directly from the device, which Luckey says will likely delight speedrunners eager to break records on Game Boy games without having to use external cameras to record the feats. (The software that enables streaming capabilities is backwards compatible, meaning it will be work of first-edition Chromatics as well.)
'The goal of Chromatic in a non-technical sense is not to replicate the experience of actually playing a Game Boy or Game Boy Color, it's to replicate the way that you felt playing it when you were younger,' Luckey says. 'You want it to be authentic but also to live up to that rose-tinted recollection of how you remember it.'
Aside from all that nostalgia, ModRetro is also trying to make a push to reinforce the concept of ownership. Though the timing isn't deliberate, Herndon points to recent efforts like Stop Killing Games, a movement of game advocates calling for the preservation of digital and online games so they can't just be taken down by the provider.
'That is one of the most upsetting things about being a modern gamer,' Herndon says. 'The true ownership experience back then is something has really gone by the wayside today, and we wanted to recapture that feeling.'
Ultimately, Luckey hopes the Chromatic isn't the last stop in ModRetro's efforts. He has his eyes set on recreating the Game Boy Advance and other retro platforms like the Nintendo 64. Eventually, he hopes the process, drawn out though it can be, will help preserve other aging technologies.
'This all sounds a lot more ridiculous and self masturbatory when you're just making a Game Boy thing,' Luckey says. 'But I'm hoping that at some point people will see ModRetro as a portal into the past that is going to live on forever. And then what I'm saying maybe won't seem quite as crazy.'