An Interview with ModRetro CEO Torin Herndon: Future of Gaming and Consumer Electronics

I’ve spent the past week with the ModRetro Chromatic, which plays Game Boy games. It rules.

Gaming is at a crossroads.

Modern gaming is a frustrating experience. Sometimes it feels like I spend more time waiting for updates than actually playing. We fiddle with drivers, wait for shaders to recompile, and sit through patch after patch when all we want is to turn on the PC or console and just have a good time.

The gaming industry may be becoming something different. Not in a good way. Gamers now have to worry about the end of physical games. This month, enthusiasts erupted after Sony announced that physical production for all new PlayStation games will be discontinued starting January 2028. Questions about game ownership in an all-digital world, the death of affordable used games, and game preservation have dominated social media and internet discussion.

Ironically, the answer may be retro physical games. I’ve spent the past week with the ModRetro Chromatic, which plays Game Boy games. It rules. No sifting through menus, no incessant patches. Just insert a cartridge, turn it on, and you’re having fun in seconds. Just like I remember from childhood.

Tae’s Newly Started Game Boy Color Physical Game Collection

The build quality is fantastic. The screen matches the original Game Boy’s pixel count, so there are no blurry visuals. The D-pad is the BEST I’ve ever used. Poor controls are normally the death knell for every other retro and modern handheld I tried. Well done, ModRetro. I can’t recommend it enough.

My favorite part of this job is talking to and learning from smart founders and executives about their life experiences. I love geeking out in the technical weeds and learning what makes companies successful.

Earlier this week, I spoke with ModRetro CEO Torin Herndon about the company’s history, what makes his co-founder Palmer Luckey special, future projects, and the state of modern gaming. He was also one of the early employees at Anduril, one of the hottest startups in the world today.

Here are lightly edited highlights from our conversation, along with my thoughts on ModRetro at the end:

Tae: Talk through your background. Stanford, Oculus and Anduril. Obviously, your relationship with Palmer Luckey.

Herndon: Let’s go back to the beginning. I’m a product designer and mechanical engineer by trade. I studied those two fields at Stanford. And then about midway through my college experience, the Oculus Kickstarter came out. I backed the DK1. And I honestly just became somewhat obsessed with working in virtual reality. That was the first time that I’d encountered Palmer as a public figure as well. I thought he was incredibly interesting.

I vowed that I was going to work in virtual reality somehow. And then as I was graduating from Stanford, that was the same summer that Facebook was acquiring Oculus. I’m already living in Menlo Park. This is in my backyard. I have to get in here.

I became a product designer on the Oculus Rift. It was the first consumer shipping headset. Kind of by happenstance I sat next to Palmer’s best friend. Through that I got to know Palmer outside of work as well.

When I met Palmer and then got to know him I quickly realized I had encountered one of the greatest minds of our generation. I was coming right out of Stanford. So I had been inundated with people who were like savants in various areas and just incredibly smart and entrepreneurial. But Palmer opened my mind to the actual ceiling of possibility. In any case, I was like I’m gonna follow this guy wherever he goes.

Tae: What made Palmer special? Why were you so impressed then?

I’ve thought about this over the past 10 years or whatever working with him. There are a few attributes. One of them is that he has a completely insatiable curiosity for an extremely broad variety of subjects. To a level that is very abnormal. Like you could ask him about almost any topic and he has an enormous amount of information and opinions on the topic.

The second thing is that Palmer’s the only person that I’ve personally encountered who truly has an eidetic or photographic memory. He can literally recall any piece of information. It’s mind-bending to interact with him and see.

Most of the media about him just doesn’t understand this because they don’t talk to him about it and he doesn’t bring it up. That is the second reason why he’s so differentiated compared to other people because he remembers everything that he’s ever looked into. Combined with that curiosity he has just an immense amount of knowledge about every subject under the sun. Those two things combine to create the third reason which is that he’s creative on a different level.

A lot of people think of Palmer as a technologist, as an engineer, as a showman, great at PR, things like that. But my opinion is that Palmer’s greatest attribute is insane levels of creativity. There is technical creativity. And that’s because he knows so much about so many disparate fields. He’s just an idea generating machine.

He ultimately got fired from Oculus for very stupid political reasons. And at that time, I just quit Facebook. And my plan was to become a freelance product designer. I started working on some early AR glasses stuff. Then two weeks later, Palmer called me and said, hey, I’m going to start a defense company. Why don’t you move down to Orange County?

My wife already also knew how I felt about this. She just quit Apple basically on the spot and we moved to Orange County. I started working on Anduril, the defense company. I grew with that company from the first 10 employees to 2,000-something employees, touching all kinds of different stuff.

Tae: You were around employee 10 at Anduril?

I think my employee grant, it says stock 7 or stock 8. I was in that first group of 10 employees, non-founder employees. It was an insane time. It was absolutely insane. I don’t want to speak out of turn about Anduril, but that company experience was definitely once in a lifetime, once in a generation.

I saw some things about the way that they built the business that I thought were different and fascinating. And that’s just something that I’ve taken with me. One of the most interesting things I think is how they approached building a product company. Anduril at the time in 2017, it was not a hugely popular investment. Now it’s like the hottest private stock ever.

Everybody thinks it’s self-evident that it’s so incredible and so disruptive, but at the time it was not popular. We raised a small seed round, or rather the founders raised a small seed round, and we knew that we had to create a product that could get into customers’ hands extremely fast with a very limited amount of capital. And that was the Sentry Tower. That was the first product.

My view on why Anduril succeeded is that they created this wedge product that we could then use to get traction but also develop this really huge internal capability. I think if we had bit off one of the future programs that we worked on like Ghost or like Anvil or some of these second, third, fourth products it would have been extremely hard to make a successful company.

It was that, that wedge product that made us an operational company because then we started shipping a mature product while then being able to invest in way more advanced programs. It was an interesting strategy that worked really well for them.

I became incredibly sick with an autoimmune disease like four years into my experience at Anduril. I took time off to try to get my health under control. My health immediately became significantly better. The stress and workload was not working with my health, so I resigned from Anduril.

A few weeks later Palmer called me and said hey I’m just not gonna let you escape and go retire you have to come help me with other stuff so why don’t you come up to my house.

I went to his house he basically pitched me to be his personal engineer. I said before this creative output is really insane so he has a note on his phone, which had, I remember him maintaining it from since I met him. And it’s just thousands and thousands of ideas. Some of them are just stupid inventions. Some of them are things that will probably be multi hundred billion dollar companies and everything in between.

He just said, why don’t you just take this list and start working on some of these ideas. That’s what I did. I ultimately got to an idea on that list that said, build an ultimate authentic tribute to the Game Boy.

So the first product that ModRetro launched is called Chromatic. It’s the only pixel-by-pixel accurate Game Boy re-creation that exists. So it’s 160 by 144 pixels. So even when you are viewing the game art at a sub-pixel level, it’s still accurate, which is important because sub pixels back then were so massive that artists would basically virtually increase the resolution that they could use by coloring in red and then two black lines, for example, and they’ll use that to highlight things and do other things in the sub pixel layer.

Yeah, the idea, honestly, it’s a similar concept to Anduril. It was a product that we knew that just me and one other person could design the entire product. It still needed to be done at a level of obsessive intensity and completely unrealistic things that no consumer electronics companies do.

Like a custom LCD for a Game Boy. That’s not a thing that anybody does. You’re typically picking an off-the-shelf, you’re cutting the glass size from an existing pixel density for an existing TFT glass. But to do it from absolute scratch where the TFT is made custom is not a thing that’s done.

Every single component in that device is custom. The speaker is custom made. Obviously, we made these magnesium shells for it, which is quite ridiculous. The buttons are made of PBT instead of ABS. Similar material to what’s used in keycaps for fancy mechanical keyboards. It’s just a truly ridiculous product.

Tae: How long did it take you to design it with one other person?

Six months. We have designed so many complicated things in our careers before that even designing something that is just done at a different level of obsessiveness is not an insanely difficult challenge. I mean VR headsets are about as difficult [as it gets], its integrated product design with firmware and software, displays and optics and everything.

We started designing that product. And then Palmer and I decided, this thing’s really cool.

We should make more than one of them. And we should resurrect the name of the first thing that Palmer ever started, which is ModRetro.

What Palmer started was an internet forum called modretro.com. It was a forum where people would congregate to, to mod classic electronics. When Oculus was founded, it went by the wayside. We just thought let’s resurrect that name and begin shipping products under that name.

This idea of retro, we think is a much more all-encompassing idea as well. And it’s become more relevant lately than it was back then.

I think that our perception is that there used to be a really tight convergence of positive user experience and technology increasing. And then for various product categories, there was kind of a peak of the convergence of those two things.

Then we entered an era of really intense value engineering. And this value engineering has destroyed so many products.

You’ve heard this term, enshittification of software. We think that enshittification applies to hardware even more than software and mixed hardware software experiences. In gaming, you’ve seen the injection of a lot of microtransactions and gambling mechanics and all of these profiles that need to collect data from you. It damages the gaming experience. In TVs, smart TVs are a great example where they’re content scanning your screen every 20 seconds so that they can send that data back. That is the entire business model of all modern TVs now.

So we formed this company with the idea to explore that [retro] value system. These tribute products are the easiest way to begin such a company because they’re already inherently containing those values. It’s a bit of a growth hack as well, honestly, because people, 100 million people own the Game Boy. So everybody instantly understands what it is.

In our perspective, to build a great and durable consumer electronics company, you have to earn a right to exist and do that steadily over time by just making good stuff.

Tae: There’s this controversy about PlayStation ending physical games. The other great thing about retro gaming with the Chromatic is you put the cart in and it just works. No downloading patches. It also works faster than what I read about the Analogue Pocket, where you have to go through some menus.

We rip out a lot of that establishing OS layer to put you into the game as quickly as possible.

The point of a game is to have a fun experience, right? Anything that gets in the way of that and introduces an enormous amount of friction in that process like what you are saying with updates.

The other thing that people don’t talk about enough is if you’re releasing a physical game or the game is on the physical device, it has to be end-to-end playable the second that you plug it in.

Whereas now, because of this model of digital games are dominant, you can ship these games and then do a Hail Mary of bug fixes in the process of shipping it and continuing to ship it. And we’ve seen now that that incentive model has created really big disasters like Cyberpunk [at launch].

Another thing that I talk about a lot is the death of actual casual gaming. Back in the day when we just had original Game Boy and Tetris. Game Boy was something that allowed them to participate in this is extremely casual touch-and-go gaming where it’s just a pleasant experience. It’s extremely fast and streamlined, no friction, no profiles, no nothing. You can play it on a plane, it doesn’t matter because you don’t even need a connection. That area of casual gaming is dead because as the consoles increased in their capability we slowly lost more and more of the people who aren’t hardcore gamers.

Now the hyper casual category is all about mobile games with their gambling mechanics. They have no depth to them at all. It’s just a financial game where they are not creating any value for people. We think that these physical games that we’re trying to make or bring back or have people re-experience, they’re an intersection of delivering the value they were supposed to deliver and bringing in a different cohort of people.

Tae: I saw that the ModRetro M64 (Nintendo 64) console is scheduled to come out later this month. How will it be better than the Analogue 3D console?

I think Analogue 3D is fine. I don’t have anything against the system. I think there’s a few areas where M64 really shines I will say.

M64 boots extremely fast. It will always probably boot faster than Analogue because of the architecture of the system. It’s a fanless design. So there isn’t a fan that’s making noise that is liable to potentially break down inside of the device.

Because of the architecture of our system, it is most likely going to be the most performant of all N64 emulators that will be created.

There’s a bunch of tiny things in product design and this really just comes down to the obsession that we have with completely vertically integrated design. Nothing is designed by our contract manufacturer. There’s no software that is outsourced to somebody else so we have the ability to be way more transparent about the development of the design to make decisions that are illogical but we think are just cool.

Tae: Palmer mentioned somewhere a Game Boy Advance console could be the next product for ModRetro?

Yes, that will come. We’re very, very deep into development with that product. And it’s very interesting. Like Chromatic, it has a pixel-accurate display as well. So, it’s perfectly accurate to the GBA. And it’s actually even accurate to the untraditional pixel layout that a GBA has. Our display is the same and it refreshes in the same direction.

There’s the difference between what we do and maybe a company like Analogue does again, because it’s completely vertically integrated, there’s an obsessiveness with making sure that things are correct, like in the Analogue Pocket, for example, they’re taking an off the shelf display and they’re actually have to rotate it 90 degrees to make it the correct aspect ratio. Every single image that is being moved to the display is rotated 90 degrees. That’s introducing a lag every single time you have a button input and you need to see the character move on the screen from that input. In between that, the image is being rotated.

There’s similar things that with M64, we’ve natively inherently architected it so that it can unlock the absolute best possible experience. Our AV adapter is another example of this ecosystem where we’ve built the M64 in a particular way, knowing that we would also design this AV adapter so that when you use our AV adapter and are outputting to a CRT, it has no lag. It has well, well under one frame of lag, and it can even handle understanding if the image is 480i or 240p, specifically in coordination with the M64 software. So it’s just an obsessive level of detail that makes it so much different than other things that have existed before.

We have big dreams, big visions. We’re a relatively small company. Our focus is to build a really great product company in a somewhat organic way, where each incremental product is earning the right to present another incremental product. We don’t really feel the need to be making something extremely splashy or extremely next generation immediately.

But I will say that the values that we think can be widely applicable to all of consumer electronics, they resonate with a lot of people. It makes recruiting easy. Employees, I think, enjoy working on that type of mission.

Tae: So you’re kind of hinting at moving outside of retro game hardware? That’s a possibility?

Yeah, we will. We will, definitely.

Thanks for your time.

Tae’s Take: I’m extremely bullish on ModRetro. They have a Steve Jobs-like product taste that will serve them well beyond retro video game consoles.

Jobs’s original DNA was combining beautifully designed, high-quality products with a simplified, friendly customer experience. After using the Chromatic, I believe ModRetro can deliver that type of premium user experience with less frustration and fewer data privacy issues.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see them expand into televisions, headphones, and other high-volume consumer electronics. I’m looking forward to all of it.

Back in 2013, I tweeted to venture capitalists that the three most promising gaming-related startups at the time were Oculus Rift (Ha!), King.com (Candy Crush), and Twitch TV. All three became massive financial winners for VCs. If I had to make a similar list today, ModRetro would be on it.

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Feel free to send me info and thoughts via email at taeauthor@gmail dot com. Due to the volume of messages I can’t promise a reply, but I do read every email.