A Game Boy Made with Drone Metal

ModRetro is a company that produces and distributes retro-gaming handheld consoles, sometimes drawing inspiration from the shapes and sizes of models that have made media history. The company is headed by Palmer Luckey, the same person who founded Oculus before selling it to Meta.

So far, there would be nothing strange. However, what has been causing a stir and fueling controversy in recent days is ModRetro's new console model, called Anduril Chromatic: the device looks like the legendary Nintendo Game Boy, but it is made from the same Magnesium and Aluminum alloy used for war drones. The name Anduril, in fact, is not a direct reference to Aragorn's sword but indicates a collaboration with another company headed by Luckey – Anduril Industries – which precisely produces such tools for military use. The collaboration is openly displayed in the bundle, which includes a headset and a pendant bearing the company's logo along with the console.

Such an overt collaboration between a gaming company and a weapons company – although both are headed by the same person – has, as we mentioned, sparked a rather heated controversy: many have found it objectionable both that arms manufacturers can raise funds through products ostensibly aimed at a younger demographic – even if the $349.99 price tag doesn't exactly make it a product "for kids" – and that something born for the defense industry can be so calmly smuggled into the mainstream.

In the past, there has been much talk about how the gaming and defense industries are interconnected: many FPS games are reportedly designed to normalize war scenarios for the population and simultaneously provide a kind of proto-military training for future recruits, somehow encouraging them to enlist [source: Kotaku].

On the other hand, Luckey's collaborations with a certain school of thought have been well known to most since 2017, when Palmer was removed from Oculus due to his collaborations with Donald Trump's propaganda machine based on various trolls [source: The Wall Street Journal]. Now that Mr. Trump sits [...again...] in the Oval Office, Luckey evidently no longer needs to keep his interests private.

We are left to wonder why a [similar] Game Boy should be made with a material designed for the arms industry... after all, the original Nintendo model was already perfectly capable of surviving a bombing...