‘The future of ModRetro is the past’. When you hear the CEO and founder of ModRetro delivering that tagline on a podcast record, then you know that incredible things are on the way. We chatted with Palmer Luckey in our latest episode of the Retrospect podcast about all things handheld gaming, creating the ultimate and final evolution of the Game Boy with the Chromatic, and much more in an hour-long interview, as well as taking some sneaky exclusives from Palmer along the way.
As many of you know, ModRetro is releasing the Chromatic handheld and partnering with GameStop, with plans to get the handhelds in stores before Christmas. Not only that, but they’ve partnered with Tetris to ship each handheld with one of the most iconic Game Boy titles of all time, just like the first Game Boy handhelds when they shipped back in 1989. Palmer spoke to us at length about the building choices he and his team made when creating the Chromatic too, from using a hardwearing lab-grown sapphire crystal for the lenses which are then laminated to the displays, to custom colour filters to recreate the same colour styles intended by the designers of the original games.
Palmer also told us some exciting news about ModRetro’s game release plans for the future, with more releases from indie developers and major studios planned for the handheld. If that’s not exclusive enough for you, however, then ModRetro is looking to resurrect rare games that players just can’t get hold of anymore, as well as games that were never even released.
‘We’re resurrecting old games that were popular that are very hard to buy now,’ said Palmer, ‘the ones that are very expensive on eBay. We don’t just want to re-release games that are rare and expensive because they’re rare; we want to release the games that are rare because there are so many people who want them vs rare because they didn’t make that many copies of them.’
Palmer went on to tell us about plans to bring back games that never actually say the light of day, effectively completing the hard work of the developers who created them back in the day. ‘We’re working with a couple of large developers that we have connections with from the Occulus days. We’re looking at first-time releasing games that were never actually launched and, in some cases, never even announced back in the 90s and early 2000s. There are actually some Game Boy games that… they were either partly finished or fully finished games where they didn’t launch them for, well, a variety of reasons.’
Retro Dodo can exclusively reveal that one of the games ModRetro is planning on releasing was made for the Game Boy Colour but was then pushed to the GBA with marketing money and efforts used to push Nintendo’s newer handheld. Another one of the games on ModRetro’s list is a title that was fully completed by the publisher, who then dropped out of the project because it was deemed to be too controversial. Nobody was able to play them; they’ve never been released for the mediums they were intended for, but Palmer and his team are bringing them onto the record finally for gamers to play.
This is an incredibly exciting time for handheld gamers and Game Boy fans; as Palmer said to us, game preservation is incredibly important, and the fact that ModRetro is planning on taking us back to the 90s and 2000s and resurrecting rare and unreleased Game Boy games from that time period on one of the most finely crafted handhelds around… well, it’s safe to say that we’re very excited! I also mentioned Cabbage for the 64DD to Palmer, so who knows, maybe that could be another exclusive a little later down the line!
