The Arms Dealer’s Nintendo 64 Will Be Fully Unveiled on Black Friday

Palmer Luckey—the founder of Oculus and inventor of the original Rift VR headset who then took his Facebook fortune to establish Anduril, a company that makes weapons of war and U.S. surveillance apparatuses—wants to sell you a Nintendo 64 for $200.

A new update to the ModRetro M64 first teased in July comes just a few weeks after Analogue finally started shipping its own, excellent Analogue 3D N64 console. As much as you may imagine you’ll enjoy a cheaper way to replay N64 games on your TV, there are plenty of ethical and financial reasons to wait your turn for the competition.

In a post on X, Luckey says ModRetro will reveal the M64 in full on Nov. 28—Black Friday. Like the $270 Analogue 3D ($20 more than at launch, a price hike that Analogue claims is “due to tariffsâ€), the M64 uses an FPGA chip (field-programmable gate array), which, in simple terms, mimics the chip logic of original hardware. In the M64’s case, Nintendo’s first console capable of 3D graphics released in 1996.

The M64 is similar to the Analogue 3D, though it uses an AMD chip, which is likely much larger and faster than the one in the Game Boy-like ModRetro Chromatic.

The ModRetro M64 hardware is getting a full reveal on Black Friday – features, colors, our incredible new controller, cutting-edge @AMD hardware, etc.

Much has changed since we launched early bird pricing at $199 earlier this year, things like inflation, component shortages,… pic.twitter.com/T8MLilyweh

— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) November 25, 2025

Differences between M64 and Analogue 3D

You can spot the odd color accents on what appears to be the M64’s power and “Menu†switches—the latter of which appears to be a dial. Otherwise, ModRetro’s N64 console looks to have the classic four controller ports and slot for N64 Game Paks. The Analogue 3D also supports original N64 controllers as well as wireless 8BitDo 64 controllers. ModRetro hasn’t shared what software the M64 may use, whereas Analogue uses its own custom 3DOS to launch your games, change CRT TV recreations, or even overclock the system.

Like all consoles today, ModRetro has had to navigate the shifting tides of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the fluctuating trade war that followed. Luckey, however, promises the M64 will remain at $200 through Black Friday and beyond. Undercutting Analogue by $70 makes sense in the effort to attract lingering retro gamers who remember when gaming was a cheaper hobby. Those customers just need to ignore the voice in the back of their head asking questions about Luckey’s growing ties to the military-industrial complex and the current Trump regime.

Back in August, eagle-eyed FPGA experts noted that the M64 could be using the MiSTer FPGA N64. While the Analogue 3D doesn’t allow users to add their own emulation cores to the system right off the bat, the M64 will be more open source, at least according to ModRetro’s marketing director Walter Lee in an interview with The Memory Core. Luckey has consistently hinted the M64 will be “the best way to play games at any price†compared to “inferior optionsâ€â€”an obvious dig at the Analogue 3D. But what that means for the sake of near 30-year-old games is up in the air.

Hey, look, it’s @AzumFpg’s MiSTer FPGA N64 core. https://t.co/dEXAT2BueW pic.twitter.com/1OLrd1wtPq

— Porkshop Express (@MisterAddons) August 26, 2025

Is an N64 worth supporting an arms dealer?

Luckey created ModRetro in 2024 to sell the Chromatic, though the name harkens back to his earlier days running the ModRetro Forums and modding Game Boys. Now, the father of modern VR headsets is more focused on making weaponized drones for the U.S. military through Anduril. He’s working with Meta on militarized AR headsets—UwU cat ears included.

That being said, Luckey can’t keep his two companies separate. On an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, he showed off a version of his Chromatic that he proudly claimed was made “with the same alloy as our attack drone airframes and is coated with the same low-signature ceramic used on Ghost X!â€

ICYMI: Here’s @PalmerLuckey talking about the wonders of Chromatic with @joerogan pic.twitter.com/UvGsWB9hJv

— ModRetro (@modretro) October 20, 2025

For those who don’t know, Ghost X is a drone designed for modern conflicts and modeled after the UAVs used by both Russia and Ukraine in that ongoing war that has claimed millions of lives. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine recently reported long-range drones and missiles killed 548 and injured 3,592 people from January through October this year alone, a major uptick from the same time frame in 2024. Reports from DefenseScoop show the U.S. intends to mass produce these drones for U.S. military use.

Sure, practically every other major tech company is somehow involved with U.S. military contracts, but Luckey’s various companies are built to promote his excessively militaristic worldview. If you want the current best N64 option, it’s the Analogue 3D, even if the console costs more. Analogue put out a restock on Nov. 24, though it’s currently sold out once more. Anybody who jumps on the ModRetro bandwagon needs to decide for themselves whether supporting an arms dealer is worth the $70 you save on a retro console.