Palmer Luckey Is Selling $200 Knock-Off Game Boy Colors

The ModRetro Chromatic is the latest attempt to cash in on retro nostalgia. It’s a slick-looking Game Boy Color knockoff that competes with the bespoke and perennially out-of-stock Analogue Pocket by playing all of your original Game Boy cartridges. The main difference is that the ModRetro Chromatic is being sold and marketed by Oculus Rift co-founder, and diehard Donald Trump booster, Palmer Luckey.

The ModRetro Chromatic comes in a variety of colors and launches later this year for $200. While it plays old Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges via an FPGA circuit, it also comes with a new version of Tetris pre-installed. It has a port for an original Link Cable to play multiplayer, as well as a USB-C port and headphone jack. Each handheld runs off three AA batteries, and appears designed to mimic the form factor of Nintendo’s devices as much as possible.

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The real selling point of the ModRetro Chromatic is its precision. “The color temps are actually right, the clock rate isn’t slightly off, the pixel structure isn’t totally wrong in a way that ruins subpixel aware sprites, etc.” Luckey told The Verge when comparing his handheld to the $220 Analogue Pocket. That’s due to a custom 160×144 pixel, 2.56-inch pixel-perfect IPS display.

The ModRetro will seemingly be built to order with GameStop also getting a certain amount of inventory. “None of it makes any business sense at all,” he told The Verge. “I don’t see this as a way to make money, I see it as the way to make the world’s best tribute to the Game Boy, something that I’ll be proud of for a very long time.”

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Luckey previously worked for Meta, which bought Oculus back in 2014 for $2 billion, before getting fired in 2016 amid his vocal support for Trump. He now runs Anduril Industries, a defense contractor that supplies killer drones and spy towers to the U.S. government. He’s currently set to throw a $100,000-a-head fundraiser for the ex-President, who was recently convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York hush money trial, in California later this week.

“Despite my work in virtual reality and defense technology, my roots are in retro gaming,” Luckey said in a press release. “The Chromatic brings back the simplicity and joy of classic gaming.” It’s unclear if Trump, who was also recently accused of using the n-word while hosting The Apprentice, will be one of the first to receive the ModRetro Chromatic when it launches later this year.

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