Before he turned 30, Palmer Luckey sold his virtual reality startup, Oculus VR, for millions. For most people, that would be the epitome of a tech career. But even after successfully pivoting into defense technology by co-founding Anduril Industries, he never lost sight of his passion. Perhaps that is what makes ModRetro special. Going back to 2009, Luckey and his friends set out to give people the video game experience he loved and felt had been missing from modern gaming – a way to connect with friends through gaming systems that the big corporate players had long ago abandoned. Chromatic began in earnest in 2014, and his visionary M64 in 2016, sidelined only by that foray into defending America. But Luckey isn’t looking to copy a dusty concept of video games or feed modern “iPad kid” more tech slop; he’s reviving an experience. That revival – over a decade in the making – closes the gap between the spirit of the OG video game world of Nintendo 64 and GoldenEye 007 and being compatible with modern tools. It’s a revival that, like Luckey himself, refuses to be defined by those who don’t share his rule-defying vision.
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Ben Domenech: When I was growing up, one of my best memories was console gaming with my siblings. We were homeschooled, and once we finished our studies for the day, we had permission to go downstairs and game for a certain amount of time. What was your experience along those lines when you were growing up?
Palmer Luckey: I don’t think I got seriously into gaming until I was a bit older. I mostly played console games with my friends growing up, but then I got really into PC gaming when I was 10, 11, or 12 — and really got into computers.
BD: What games were taking up most of your time in both periods?
PL: Oh, man. On the console side, the late 1990s were a Pokémon world in a way that nobody will ever understand unless they were there. It’s hard to communicate to people because, of course, it’s still the largest media franchise on an ongoing basis. But there was Pokémon mania in the 1990s.
I also got really into Super Smash Bros. and GoldenEye 007. On the PC side, I played Descent and Quake III Arena. Later, I got into Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2, and I spent an enormous amount of time playing TF2. I was a PC gamer, though I also spent a lot of time playing Halo and Halo 2.
BD: Who did you play as in Team Fortress?
PL: I was almost always the Heavy Weapons Guy. I jumped around — I played Soldier, Scout, and Spy — but mostly I was Heavy.
I had a group of guys I played with all the time from the ModRetro forum. I started the ModRetro forums as a place for people to combine the best of modern electronics with vintage electronics, especially by turning old game consoles into portables. That was the crew I regularly played TF2 with.
I think the reason I mainly played Heavy was that everybody had their role. We figured out how to work together very effectively. We always knew how to push the cart and stay on the point. It’s a lot more fun to play games like that cooperatively with friends than with random people you’ll never see again.
BD: What do you think we lost when gaming started to move away from that model and toward something you do with strangers?
PL: It happened when the games industry moved, in so many ways, from innovation to extraction. They ruined a lot of the natural dynamics that made these games special.
I like that you can do online multiplayer trivially easily in most games now. But I also remember that, if you wanted to play Halo 2 with your friends, what you really wanted to do was get together, hold a LAN party, and plug all your Xboxes into one another. The same thing was true with PCs. A lot of modern games — probably most modern multiplayer games — don’t support that even as an option.
So, when you ask what was lost, that’s a very clear example. It’s not just that they are encouraging us to play in a much more isolated way. It’s not just that they’re discouraging split-screen play or LAN parties. It’s that they’ve completely removed support for those methods of play because they want everything gated through data-collecting, revenue-generating subscription services.
BD: I think that’s such a different cultural phenomenon from what gaming used to be. I remember going to a friend’s office, where a bunch of guys who were a little older than me were playing Doom II on their office computers and yelling at one another in person. It’s a completely different experience from having some random stranger yell at you online.
What is really lost when the attitude is all about data — when every gamer is treated as a commodity instead of someone participating in a distinctly social experience?
PL: What’s happened is a very negative, self-reinforcing loop. Developers spend more and more on games, creating huge set pieces and assembling absolutely massive teams. When I was growing up, many of my favorite games were made by teams of a dozen or maybe two dozen people. There are still lots of great games being made by teams that size today.
But the big industry has reached the point of having such large budgets that it can’t start the game-development process by asking, “What’s something new we can do on the gameplay side that people will really love?” It has to start with: “How will this make money? What is the model?” Instead of saying, “This is a new type of fighting game,” it says, “This is a free-to-play live-service game.” They have to start with the business model to pay the bills that come with modern game development.
I’m sorry — I was ranting a bit.
BD: No, I completely hear you. The comparison I’ve made is that it’s the difference between gathering at a friend’s house to play poker together and playing poker with strangers online. The two experiences have almost no resemblance to each other.
PL: I know this is going to sound weird, but the dynamic you’re talking about is exactly one of the things I was hopeful about when I was running Oculus VR. My hope was that you could use technology to recreate a lot of that sitting-around-with-friends, face-to-face feeling — that you could feel embodied and present in a virtual environment in a way that was akin to what you could do with those multiplayer games.
Some games have successfully pulled that off. They really make you feel as if you’re all there, doing something together in person. Unfortunately, as the industry moved beyond indie gamers and visionaries who understood that having people co-present — even virtually — felt very different, it instead moved back to the lowest common denominator: people who drink Starbucks and not Mountain Dew.
They don’t get it. They don’t understand. They weren’t around for split-screen gaming. They weren’t around for LAN parties. A lot of them don’t even care about games, per se. They’re in the industry because they want to pursue some social-justice agenda, or because they couldn’t cut it in a real job. The games industry is a place where people willing to work for too little money can come in pretty easily, especially if they have friends on the inside hooking them up. Unfortunately, even the VR industry has turned into basically the exact same kind of slop as the rest of the industry — just in VR.
BD: I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old — two daughters — and this is something that happened just this week. I brought home ModRetro Tetris, opened it up and told them, “This is Tetris, and you girls need to share.”
They fired it up. It took them a little while to figure it out, but then they started going back and forth and paying attention to their scores. When I left, I thought, “This is amazing.” In the space of three days, they were already getting a little good at it.
It was such an echo of my own experience, and one that feels totally alien to so many other gaming experiences today. Talk a little bit about children’s exposure to games — and particularly the tangibility of what you’re trying to do with this project.
PL: I was deeply involved with the development of ModRetro Tetris. If you look at the credits, it’s only about nine people — which is a good example of what I was just talking about. I think it’s my favorite version of Tetris ever. We were able to combine many of the best elements of old-school Tetris with some of the modern rules and competitive improvements that people have decided they like.
I got distracted by the Tetris side of it. What was the second part of the question?
BD: It was interesting to see my children — whose experience with games until now has essentially been limited to dancing games, or things where you’re posing in front of a little camera — have something tangible in their hands for the first time. They immediately caught on and then asked, “Are there more games? Can we play those?” I even let them watch a YouTube review of some of the original games so they could pick which ones I would order for them, which I did.
It was interesting to see kids interacting with games in that way. Do you think part of this project is about showing kids a different avenue toward gameplay that they might never have experienced?
PL: One hundred percent. Modern games are basically dopamine-addiction apparatuses. Even if the people building the games didn’t set out to create that, they have to build them that way by necessity. Many of the things that keep you coming back and hooked don’t use the same mechanisms that games used to.
Games didn’t used to have all these artificial mechanisms to keep you engaged. You were engaged because you were explicitly striving for excellence, trying to get a high score or entering that flow state. I think Tetris and many games like it have more in common with physical games such as mancala or Go — which people have been playing for hundreds or even thousands of years — than they do with modern smartphone-style video games. It’s a totally different mechanism of attraction and retention, and I wish the games industry could get back to that on a broader basis.
It attracts a certain type of person, and I would argue that it may even help form someone into a certain type of person. Look at the sort of person who is prototypically playing smartphone games like Candy Crush, and then look at Tetris. Jeff Bezos has said on the record that Tetris reprograms your brain; he was huge into Tetris. Even Hillary Clinton was famously addicted to Tetris. She has said so in interviews, and there are pictures of her aboard Air Force One playing Tetris on her personal Game Boy.
Even when you get to people who can experience anything, there is something about some of these games that still makes them unique, standalone experiences. Those people aren’t the ones going in to play Fortnite and FarmVille.
BD: There is obviously a significant concern — mostly among conservative parents, but not entirely — about children’s screen usage and screen time, particularly in the context of education. I know you’re familiar with that. What makes this type of “screen time” different, from your perspective, in terms of the way your brain responds to it?
PL: I think it is very different because it was designed in a different age, for different reasons and with a different business model. People were trying to sell you a game and make you want to buy it. They weren’t trying to keep you coming back 365 days in a row, obsessively checking every box and tapping into a lot of the psychological mania that many people have latent inside them.
As I mentioned before, I really do think many older video games are more like non-video games, partly because that’s what inspired them. The people who built early video games didn’t grow up with other video games to inspire them. They grew up inspired by things in the physical world: actual physical puzzles, crossword puzzles or literal geometric puzzles.
Tetris is basically a real-world puzzle game of the kind that has existed for thousands of years, turned into something you can do in bite-sized chunks on a digital device. It has nothing in common with the social, local, mobile-subscription-service games that kids are getting hooked on today. That’s what makes it different. Those games were created from things that have compelled people for thousands of years, rather than from the trends of the past 10 or 15 years.
I’m much more comfortable letting my kid play Tetris for hours than most of the games coming out today.
BD: One hundred percent. I also think it’s a lot like how building with LEGOs rewires your brain.
PL: That’s a great example. I had so many LEGOs, and I played with them until I wore the edges off.
BD: My kids are still playing with the plastic tubs of LEGOs that I collected as a kid. They dump them out and play with them.
PL: It’s funny you mention that, because I was about to say that even modern LEGO has lost its way in some respects. The company is building collectible knickknacks for adults and leaning so heavily on specialized pieces that the sets are much less configurable than they used to be. They used to have connection points along basically every surface and every facet. Now you have huge, curving plastic pieces and internal skeleton pieces that make it very hard to build anything cohesive.
You can build greebled mecha, with a bunch of crazy stuff sticking off the sides, but it’s harder to build structures.
BD: I had the same experience. I bought my older daughter a couple of different LEGO sets that she wanted when we went to the store. As she was working on them, I thought, “This is really different.” So I got the old tubs out, and they play with those much more than they do the new stuff.
The other thing they do — and I love that they do this — is respond to things they’ve seen by making something of their own. They were watching the end of an F1 race on TV, for instance. Afterward, one of my daughters tried to draw the F1 car, while the other started building one. That’s a completely different, tangible experience, and I think we’ve lost something like that in some of these projects.
Let’s shift to the M64 project. For people who don’t know, explain why it is so significant — why it’s important and what was lacking in the marketplace.
PL: It really gets back to how ModRetro started. I started ModRetro in 2009 as an internet forum for people who were like me. We were reverse-engineering many of these consoles and turning them into handhelds.
The M64 project actually began in the 2010s. Many of us grew up with the N64. Originally, it was a project to build a portable Nintendo 64 by reverse-engineering the original, creating our own cloned schematic and then using original Nintendo 64 chips to build a new, super-portable Nintendo 64. We were going to build 64 of them.
Over time, as FPGA technology advanced, we realized it would be possible to build something that didn’t rely on old chips. We could reverse-engineer the Nintendo 64 and then build a new Nintendo 64 that would allow our kids — and everyone else — to play the games they already own.
Have you seen the deep-dive video I did on the M64?
The Nintendo 64 wasn’t designed to keep working for 30 or 40 years. They didn’t gold-plate many of the connectors, so they oxidize and stop working. They also used capacitors that can blow or go bad over time.
Most importantly, the original Nintendo 64 hardware doesn’t even work with most modern televisions. Very few modern TVs support composite video, and the ones that do typically support it in very poor, naïve ways. We wanted to make something you could use with the modern TV you already have in your house.
People say, “Palmer, wouldn’t it be more authentic if people just got an old CRT, repaired their Nintendo 64 and did it that way?” Absolutely. There’s a place for that, but it’s an enthusiast thing.
BD: Yes. For the first three years my wife was with me, she kept asking, “Why do you still have that chunky old TV? You have to get rid of that.”
PL: Exactly. For a lot of people, it isn’t an option. They don’t know how to repair their old console. They aren’t going to be able to convince their wife to let them keep their old CRT running in the house. Whatever the reason, you would never reach a new audience that way.
We wanted to bring back the Nintendo 64 and that whole era of gaming — just as we did with Chromatic — to a totally new audience. The way to do that was to make something easy to buy, low-cost and totally authentic to the original experience. You just plug it into your TV and play.
BD: As I said, some of my favorite memories are of playing those games — playing GoldenEye with my brother and sister in the basement and yelling at one another. It was such an embodied experience.
PL: That’s exactly what we’re trying to protect. On Chromatic and M64, we’ve been rereleasing many of these old games. Some of them are hard to find and expensive in working condition. Some are insanely expensive.
We just rereleased ZAS, which was a Game Boy game that was going for around $4,000 because so few copies were available for sale. Even games that everyone played — old Pokémon games, for example — now regularly go for more than $100 just for loose cartridges. It’s kind of crazy. We’re trying to make that accessible.
The original idea for the M64 project dates to around 2012, with a group of ModRetro members. It got serious around 2016. That was when we started X-raying boards, sanding them down and building schematics. We built the first reverse-engineered version back then. It was very early and needed a lot of work, but the project was first working in the 2010s.
BD: I know you’re a busy guy, and I don’t want to take too much of your time. Just two more questions.
The cliché cited by many social conservatives — many of whom are friends of mine — is about young men in their basements with their video games. You know the whole spiel. It seems to me that what you’re saying is: Instead of just complaining about this, why don’t we make gaming better — better for the soul, better for friendship and better for camaraderie?
PL: You’ve got it exactly right. And the best part is that I don’t have to be a genius to do this. The blueprint is already there. It’s in the games that the reasonably well-adjusted conservative adults of today grew up with.
The games we played didn’t ruin us, and they didn’t turn us into iPad kids. Even without getting into the science or the brain waves, anyone who has seen an iPad kid and then seen kids sitting around a Nintendo 64 playing GoldenEye knows there is a radical, massive difference between the two things — even if both happen to involve a screen.
BD: For someone who is convinced by your argument — or at least open to it — what entry point would you suggest? I talk to my friends about screens and iPad kids all the time.
If you have children who are 10 or younger and you want to expose them to an experience that has largely disappeared — the kind you had as a kid, which did not screw you up — where should they start? Which of these products or games should they adopt?
PL: On the Chromatic side, I’d say two kids with two Chromatics and two copies of Tetris, playing head-to-head with an actual link cable — not over the internet. That’s pretty much the pinnacle of what you can do on a road trip or sitting on a couch.
Then, if you’re going back into older games, the N64 is interesting. It was one of Nintendo’s worst-selling consoles, but so many of its most important experiences involved local cooperative or competitive play. That’s not the case today. Almost every popular N64 game was an in-person multiplayer game that was about socializing people.
Let’s run through the list: Mario Kart 64; Mario Party 1, 2 and 3; GoldenEye 007; Star Fox 64 multiplayer; Perfect Dark; and, of course, Super Smash Bros. How did I almost forget that?
You can pick any one of those games, take your iPad kids and put them in front of it. If you’re worried about screens, watch an iPad kid sit in front of an N64 with his three best buddies and play Smash Bros. It is a totally different experience, a totally different kind of brain activation. Those two activities look nothing alike.
I know a lot of people simply think the way they grew up was better. But in this case, games have gotten so bad for kids’ brains that the old and new experiences are basically incomparable.
To use an analogy — maybe this is a good thing to end the call on — have you ever used marijuana?
BD: I have not.
PL: Neither have I. I’m totally straight-edge. So we’re two squares having this conversation.
Something that quite a few people are familiar with — and an analogy that many of my more delinquent friends have understood when we’ve discussed this issue — is the difference between marijuana then and now.
There are people today who grew up smoking the kind of pot that existed in the 1960s: hippie pot that was relatively low-potency. There was a lot of ritual and a communal aspect to it. Much of it was a ritualistic protest against the man: “Look at us. We’re criminals. We’re ne’er-do-wells. We’re not part of their system. We’re using marijuana — the devil’s lettuce.”
That’s totally incomparable to marijuana or THC use today. The hits people take from their vapes today are hundreds of times stronger and contain hundreds of times more THC than what people used back then. Marijuana has been hyper-optimized. Even natural marijuana is dozens of times more potent than what people were smoking 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago.
I think games are the same way, and some people haven’t figured that out. You, I, and our friends talk about these issues and say, “Man, I don’t want to raise an iPad kid.” We know there is something different about the games we grew up with.
The real discussion should be about parents who don’t understand that the games their kids play are not the games they grew up with. New games don’t affect children the same way. They do not give children the same benefits — or even the same lack of benefits.
Right now, many parents who played games as kids are letting their children become iPad kids. They’re like the hippies who smoked dirt weed in the 1960s and 1970s and think there’s no difference between that and their teenager smoking something 100 times more potent today.
People like you and me need to sound the alarm. That doesn’t mean we need to play only old-school games. But we need to recognize that something new, stronger, and more addictive has been one-shotting all our kids — and we have to protect them from it.
BD: I think that’s a great way to end. Thank you again. I truly appreciate your time. It’s funny that we’ve had so many common experiences with this, and that’s why I love the project so much.
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