Palmer Luckey’s Nintendo 64 Reimagining Is Almost Here

Palmer Luckey is a gamer at heart — and he’s been cooking up something new.

The Oculus cofounder first made his mark on gaming by changing the VR landscape. Then he began releasing new gaming designs and modern versions of retro consoles.

Luckey is back with another design soon to hit the market: a take on the Nintendo 64.

The ModRetro M64 will be fully revealed on Black Friday, Luckey wrote in an X post with a teaser video.

“Much has changed since we launched early bird pricing at $199 earlier this year, things like inflation, component shortages, tariffs, and more,” he wrote.

These changes haven’t changed the price, Luckey wrote in a piece of “great news.”

“ModRetro can keep the price at $199 not just for early signups, but for Black Friday and beyond,” he wrote. “Get ready to see what a couple Benjamins can still buy you.”

The ModRetro M64 will feature some of the Nintendo 64’s classic graphics, 4K graphics powered by AMD, and additional gaming titles coming soon, according to the teaser video.

Luckey’s “ModRetro” device collection also includes the Chromatic, a portable console that runs Game Boy cartridges. The device quickly sold out after its release in 2024.

Luckey frames his ModRetro devices as being compatible with Game Boy or Nintendo 64 games, but not exact replicas. Though it looks similar to the original console in appearance, the Chromatic doesn’t feature Nintendo or “Game Boy” branding on the device itself. Responding to a 2024 Fast Company story that included an analyst questioning the legality of the Game Boy cartridge-playing device, Luckey wrote on X at the time that the “entire point of our patent system is to trade eventual free use for time-limited exclusivity,” and that “1989 was a long time ago.”

The Anduril cofounder is an avid video game collector. When the world’s largest video game collection went on auction in 2014, Luckey put in an early bid, before bowing out.

In an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Luckey described a secret location for his video game collection.

“I put that in one of my missile bases, 200 feet underground,” he said.

On Joe Rogan’s podcast in October, Luckey showcased his personal ModRetro Chromatic, which he described as “even nicer than the ones we normally sell.” He said the device was an Anduril special edition, made from the same alloys the company uses in its attack drones.

On the X teaser, one commenter asked why they would buy Luckey’s M64 product and not a rival game console from Analogue. Luckey responded by citing lower latency, open-source hardware, better compatibility with modern TVs, and the device’s relative affordability.

“It is better by every objective measure,” he wrote. “And that is without even getting into how much better our controller is, or our library of new, re-released, and never-released N64 titles we are about to launch.”