Palmer Luckey is the latest entrant into a small but booming segment of the video-game industry that caters to devotees of some of the earliest games. Mr. Luckey speaks onstage at during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on Oct. 10, 2018 in Beverly Hills, Calif.Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Palmer Luckey, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who founded Anduril Industries, a defence contractor that builds killer drones, is in the midst of launching a new product.
It’s a hand-held device packed with high-tech circuitry, enclosed in a sleek magnesium-alloy shell with a sapphire crystal face. This US$199 device, called the Chromatic, has only one function: It plays decades-old video-game cartridges originally designed for the Nintendo Game Boy.
In a launch video for the device, Mr. Luckey notes that all these high-end features “are fundamentally irrational from a money-making perspective.” The Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, were released in 1989 and 1998, respectively, and are two of the bestselling video-game consoles of all time. They were made out of plastic, for kids, and not designed to outlast the childhoods of their original owners. But the Chromatic, Mr. Luckey says, is “the ultimate way to play Game Boy games,” and will “last for generations as a piece of heirloom-grade tribute art.”
Mr. Luckey is the latest entrant into a small but booming segment of the video-game industry that caters to devotees of some of the earliest games – the titles whose rudimentary graphics and looping background melodies burrowed into the brains of a generation of children, now middle-aged and beginning to feel the ache of nostalgia.
For Mr. Luckey and other technologists, nostalgia is an engineering problem to be solved. The market is now teeming with devices that make a paradoxical promise: They will revive and even improve old video games without compromising the original experience of playing them. A mini-industry has sprouted around the idea that technology, which usually looks to the future, can also recapture feelings from the past.
The Chromatic is at least the second high-end Game Boy modernization to be released in the past five years. And other companies, along with a hobbyist community, have come up with techniques for reviving other aging video-game consoles. Many of these older machines are no longer covered by patents, freeing outsiders to tinker with or replicate them.
The main problem that the Chromatic and its competitors are trying to solve is that the screens on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color no longer look impressive. Unlike the screens on modern hand-held devices, such as smartphones, they don’t emit light; they are usable only when reflecting light from a nearby lamp, or the sun. Even in a well-lit room, the images they produce can appear dim and ghostly. The experience of using them is not the same now as it was in the 1990s – but Game Boys haven’t changed. Only user expectations have.
“We wanted to make a device that gives you the feeling the way you remember it, not the way it actually was,” said Torin Herndon, the 31-year-old chief executive officer of ModRetro, the Luckey-founded, California-based company that designed and is now shipping the Chromatic to those who preordered it last year. Mr. Herndon worked both at Anduril and at Mr. Luckey’s previous company, the virtual-reality headset maker Oculus, before being placed in charge of a series of technological side projects. (Among Mr. Luckey’s non-technical interests is Donald Trump, whose nostalgia-soaked campaign to “Make America Great Again” he has supported since 2016. His brother-in-law is Matt Gaetz.)
The screen on the Chromatic is a painstaking recreation of the original Game Boy Color screen, custom designed to match the original’s colour balance and pixel structure. But unlike the original, it’s as bright and crisp as a modern display. Inside the device is a circuit board with components designed to closely mimic the internals of the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Everything is mounted inside a handheld shell with the same rounded corners and button layout as the Game Boy.
But recapturing a feeling is not an exact science, and the quest for total fidelity to the original Game Boy experience has more than one end point. The Chromatic’s main commercial competitor, the Analogue Pocket, a US$220 device released in 2021 by the U.S. company Analogue, has a minimalist design and a larger screen that makes games appear not only brighter, but bigger and sharper. Tech reviewers are split over which approach is better.
The difficulty of reviving old games without ruining them is something Bob Neal has spent the past decade and a half thinking and talking about. He’s the founder of RetroRGB, a website and YouTube channel that have chronicled a succession of new technological solutions to the problem of obsolescence.
In an interview, he explained that what began as a scattered community of enthusiasts sharing information on online message boards has evolved into an industry and a scene.
A homebrew community has sprung up around open-source software that makes it relatively easy for hobbyists to assemble high-quality modern replacements for old video-game systems on their own, with purchased parts. Businesses have joined in. Analogue, in addition to the Pocket, has released replacements for other systems, such as the Super Nintendo, originally released in 1990.
Though Mr. Neal admits that nostalgia is sometimes what draws people to yesterday’s games, he rejects the idea that a longing for the past is the only attraction.
“The fact that so many of these games are just brilliant games is what keeps people coming back,” he said.
There are many low-cost ways of enjoying old video games, but perfection comes at a price. One of the main topics of discussion on RetroRGB this year has been the RetroTink 4K, a US$750 device created and self-marketed by Mike Chi, a California-based 39-year-old who now splits his time between his retro-gaming business and his other job as an electrical engineer for medical devices.
Mr. Chi said he played video games as a child but took a hiatus from them in young adulthood. When he rediscovered his old games in his early 30s and tried to play them on a modern TV, the results were terrible. Today’s digital displays stretch and process the analog video signals from older systems to make them fit the new style of screen, and the results can be ugly. Doing this can also introduce input lag – a split-second delay between a button press and an on-screen reaction, which can make a game almost unplayable.
The RetroTink 4K looks like a tiny cable box festooned with input jacks. It uses custom-designed electronics to do a far more intricate and less lag-prone job of this stretching and processing – it’s called “upscaling” – than a modern TV can do on its own.
But its most prized attribute is something else: On a high-end, very bright flat-panel display, it can make video almost appear to glow the way it did on the fuzzy, phosphorescent tube-based TVs of 30 years ago. Squint, and you can convince yourself that you’re looking at an image made of light from another time.
“Of course, it’s not 100-per-cent perfect, but it gets, you know, 90 per cent of the way there,” Mr. Chi acknowledged.
In explaining why his customers are drawn to this type of experience, Mr. Chi pointed to technology’s evolution since the 1990s. Today’s tech, he said, is “all invasive social media, hateful online stuff, which I think makes people unhappy. There’s a lot more happiness associated with the simpler technology.”
But he doesn’t think this happiness necessarily belongs to the past, or needs to remain there. Many of the people he deals with, he said, tell him that they hope to share their childhood games with their own children.
