ModRetro is a Grift
Imagine you are in charge of a boutique retro gaming company that has made an FPGA recreation of the Game Boy Color. It's premium hardware that emulates the original console extremely accurately, it accepts original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, and you are also hiring talented developers to publish game cartridges that work both on your new hardware and the original it's based off of. These ventures end up being pretty popular, and you gain a sizable fanbase despite the existence several other competitors in the FPGA console space, most notably Analogue.
Now, you have to make a follow up to this, another FPGA console based around a popular retro console. What console do you pick? Maybe you'd select the Game Boy Advance, it seems a natural follow up that would then bring you up to par with the Analogue Pocket and Game Bub. Or maybe you could do the NES, as it has a thriving homebrew scene, and there's a gap in the market due to the fact that the AVS and Analogue NT are no longer being produced. Similar deal with the SEGA Genesis, or Super Nintendo, they don't seem to have FPGA recreations on the market at the moment, and plenty of developers create homebrew for those consoles.
I guarantee you that you would not organically come to the conclusion that the next console you should recreate would be the Nintendo 64.
(The ModRetro M64, image source ModRetro/Gagadget)
Anyway, if you haven't already realized, this article is about ModRetro and Palmer Luckey. I'm not going to pull any punches, Luckey is a fascist billionaire who made his fortune selling weapons of war that are being deployed in the Middle East right now in an unjust war that has already directly targeted and killed over 100 children. ModRetro as it exists today is built from that foundation of human suffering, and if you support the company despite knowing this, you are doing a bad thing and you are harming the retro gaming community. Sorry, not sorry.
ModRetro as a company in the retro gaming space is... anomalous, to put it lightly. Their competitors are for the most part, bona fide hobbyists, operating on hobbyist budgets. Then in comes Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift whom, after getting allegedly ousted from Facebook over his financial support of Donald Trump, made a hard pivot to creating drones and surveillance systems when he founded Anduril Industries alongside former Palantir executives. That venture made him one of the richest people in the world. Suffice it to say, there's a pretty simple explanation why ModRetro has gotten a lot of mainstream coverage and attention the way many of these other niche hobbyist companies haven't, and why they've been able to get licenses such as Tetris, Asteroids, Croc, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Rayman; they have functionally unlimited money at their disposal.
In the blog post where he first announced the ModRetro Chromatic, Luckey writes:
This reveal might seem out of nowhere given that most people know me for my work on virtual reality technology and lethal autonomous weapons systems, but my background in this space is even longer-lived. (...) I was something of a Game Boy® hacking pioneer - I was the first person to LED backlight a Game Boy®, the first to LED backlight a Game Boy® Pocket, and the first to transplant the guts of a Game Boy® Advance into an original Game Boy® shell, all mods that would go on to become extremely popular in the retro gaming cottage industry years later.
Some people have speculated that the only reason ModRetro exists is to launder Luckey's reputation as an arms dealer, but I think the explanation is simpler than that, I think he is genuine about his enthusiasm for this stuff, and he wishes that people like himself (fascists) were more prominent in the retro gaming sphere. The rest of the blog post leans heavily on nostalgia and how games used to be better but now all suck because of nebulous reasons that definitely have nothing to do with capitalism. Of course, I can't help but call out the fact that he apparently didn't consider forming a retro hardware company until after Analogue proved that FPGA technology could be profitable. Maybe he really did want to do this all along, but he just had to sell a bunch of drones and surveillance systems to the US army to be able to afford it first, you know!
Circling back to ModRetro's newest hardware, the M64 is an FPGA recreation of the Nintendo 64, building upon the open source MiSTER FPGA and the MiSTER N64 core. Everyone reporting on this device has taken it's premise at face value, but I really want to emphasize how weird it is as a follow up to the Chromatic. It's reveal came hot off the heels of Analogue getting ready to release the Analogue 3D, their own recreation of the Nintendo 64. For Analogue it makes sense, they've been in the market for years and recreating the N64 with FPGA technology was long thought to be impossible on pre-existing FPGA hardware such as MiSTER. However, for ModRetro, this is now the second product where they are choosing to butt heads directly with Analogue instead of looking to fill in the gaps in the market. And everything about the M64 feels tailor designed to be the antithesis of the Analogue 3D, the A3D is a locked down system, it'll play your N64 cartridges and nothing else, so the M64 is going to be able to be an open FPGA system that can load ROMs for various systems, which is a complete reversal of how the Analogue Pocket and ModRetro Chromatic are. The 8bitdo Controller that comes with the A3D is a modern re-imagining of the Nintendo 64 controller, so the controller that comes with the M64 is going to a perfect recreation of the original Nintendo 64 controller. All the hype surrounding the M64 focuses on how it'll allegedly be better at doing everything the A3D does and more.
ModRetro's Head of Marketing claimed that ModRetro's objective is not just to be a recreation of the Nintendo 64 but "to make the M64 platform the cheapest generalized device for this sort of open source activity . I would hope that retro gaming fans should be able to see the tension at the heart of those two ideas. An open source FPGA device designed to be a generalized device for playing whatever you want, but it only accepts Nintendo 64 cartridges and N64 controllers? Give me a break, that makes absolutely no sense! The N64 has a notoriously small library of games, the homebrew scene is far smaller and difficult to get into than Game Boy, so it's not like they can pump out new games, and the N64 controller would be dogshit for playing other retro games. Imagine playing a game from any other console with that three pronged monstrosity. Now granted, you could probably just pair a modern bluetooth controller, but there's an inherent conflict in design philosophy. It doesn't make sense for the average retro enthusiast.
(In my opinion, the SuperStation One is the true competitor to the M64, and it blows it out of the water in every way possible. Image source Retro Remake)
Compare it to the SuperStation One, a similar multi-system MiSTER-based emulation device that is designed aesthetically around the Playstation One, and accepts PS1 controllers and memory cards. The optional SuperDock addon allows you to play games off of CDs, including PS1, Sega CD and Saturn, and even PC CDs. Sure, PS1 controllers aren't ideal for every retro console, but the OG controller is remarkably similar to the SNES controller, and the DualShock is the blueprint for the modern controllers that we use today. The creator, Taki Udon, also put a lot of focus into it being compatible with every kind of image signal out of the box, so you can easily play it on your old CRTs as well as your modern flatscreen television. I'm calling all this out to say, this device makes sense in the way that the M64 doesn't. I simply do not understand what market the M64 is going for except I guess people who want to hold off of buying the A3D because, while they still really want an FPGA N64 that plays all their original cartridges, they also really need a multi-system FPGA emulation device and refuse to spend even a little bit more than $200 on their hobby. That market can't be that big, can it?
ModRetro is seeking a billion dollars in valuation, by the way. What? Why?
At the heart of ModRetro is a grift. Sure, maybe it's not a grift in the same way as the SuperSEGA or the Intellevision Amico, they've actually released a functioning product. Everyone who uses it raves about how great it is, and how premium it feels, but that's because this hardware is subsidized by blood, misery, the destabilization of the Middle East, as well as DHS and ICE. Luckey has claimed to be selling the Chromatic at a loss, and I have absolutely no doubt that the same thing will be happening with the M64. While competitors have to grapple with increased prices due to tariffs, ModRetro has a unique in with the Trump administration (Matt Gaetz is Luckey's brother in law, btw) to potentially get around them. Either that or they'll just continue to subsidize it with the billions of dollars at their disposal. So... again, why is ModRetro seeking funding to the tune of a billion dollars?
This seems to be leading to a classic rugpull. They came out swinging, eating into their competitors' profits with underpriced products, gaining trust with the retro gaming community, and slowly entrenching themselves as a staple. Then when their competitors are hurting and many gamers are on their side, they'll switch up their strategy to profit-extraction. Mark my words, years from now, they will not be selling these products for as cheap as they are now. Maybe they'll even do something mildly clever and discontinue all their original products to replace them with "premium" versions that have new features or are made of "higher quality materials" or whatever.
(The Anduril Branded ModRetro Chromatic. Image source Kotaku/ModRetro)
And there's the other aspect to this, the grift of sneaking fascism into the retro gaming sphere. This is far from the first example of someone in the community having fascist or fascist adjacent politics, an example that comes to mind is RetroSix using a Black Lives Matter hashtag to promote his own products. However this is the first and as far as I'm aware only instance of a billionaire infiltrating the space and trying to appropriate it to their own end. Plenty of talented developers chose to work with ModRetro despite not supporting Luckey or Anduril, claiming they see ModRetro as it's own entity operating independently. Then, ModRetro announced an Anduril branded Chromatic made from attack drone metal.
In my opinion, the reason that ModRetro did this, or probably more accurately, the reason that Luckey did this, was as a loyalty test. Maybe he saw the reporting about how people who work with ModRetro don't approve of him or Anduril and decided that he wanted to filter out those people. You don't get to play pretend anymore, ModRetro is a fascist company that benefits from the United States' War Machine, and if you work for them you also support that.
So, what do we do about all this? There is really only one answer, we in the retro gaming community need to blackball ModRetro as much as possible. Do not buy their products, do not promote their products, do not work with them, and make sure everybody knows that Palmer is a disgusting creep who thinks girls should be getting pregnant when they are children. Many people have been banging the drum about ModRetro's direct tie to Anduril since the beginning, even if mainstream press has been shy to admit that, instead drumming up soulless hype for a Game Boy created by the "Oculus Founder". I really don't think they'll ever beat out Analogue in the space, despite the fact that that is what all their focus seems to be exhausted upon. After all, the M64 was supposed to launch Holiday 2025, and yet it's still nowhere to be seen.
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