You might think it’s pretty weird to hear the founders of a VR company and a social media platform publicly complaining about how things used to be better back in the dial-up days. Nevertheless, that is what happened at CES on Wednesday, when Oculus creator Palmer Luckey and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian gave a joint talk about the joys of “tech nostalgia.”
Luckey, who initially made his fortune in VR and now runs the defense contractor Anduril, and Ohanian both seemed to agree: Stuff was better in the old days.
The catch, however, is that Luckey and Ohanian weren’t really criticizing technology itself (Luckey said, during his remarks, that he supported AI and felt it was changing workflows for the better); instead, they were criticizing the aesthetics of technology. Vintage consumer tech products, they argued, are superior to today’s — and it’s the styles and form factor of the past that will determine tech’s future, they claimed.
“It’s not just about nostalgia for the old; it’s about the fact that it’s just objectively better,” Ohanian said of some older products.
After going on a short tirade about how great the 1999 first-person shooter Quake: Arena is, Luckey similarly sang the praises of old-school media. “There is something that used to exist in the intentionality of building a music library — whether that was building whole albums or building mix tapes,” Luckey said, adding that, in the era of endless downloads, you clearly “lose something.”
Luckey also pointed to younger people who are nostalgic for time periods that they don’t even remember or have any personal connection to. “Why do they think it’s good? It’s not because they’re remembering their childhoods. It’s not because they’re harkening back to some earlier time. It’s because they’re recognizing that it is literally better, some of this old stuff.”
Certain consumer trends would seem to suggest that Luckey and Ohanian are on to something. Nostalgia is obviously big across the board these days (look at all those 1980s period pieces coming out of Hollywood), but nostalgic tech design is a particularly thriving niche. Young people are overwhelmed and oversaturated by the internet. As a result, many have developed new interests in physical media — like collecting cassettes and vinyl. Meanwhile, new, low-tech devices with retro designs are also seeing an uptick in interest (just check out the Clicks Communicator phone that debuted at CES this year).
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Given that consumer interests are trending this direction, Luckey and Ohanian’s enthusiasm for vintage tech could also just end up being a savvy business strategy. That is, if Americans are feeling nostalgic, you might as well monetize it.
Indeed, Luckey has already been doing this. The defense contractor, who sports an ’80s mullet, launched a project in 2024 called ModRetro Chromatic — a Game Boy-like device that retails for $199, allows gameplay of old cartridge classics from the 1990s, and has been called one of “the best ever made” of its kind.
On Wednesday, Ohanian brought one of the ModRetro units onstage and proudly showed it off to the crowd. Ohanian, who has spoken very publicly about his love for Luckey’s gaming company, has also said he’s interested in creating his own vintage-style game.
There were a lot of colorful moments during Wednesday’s talk, most of which were generated by Luckey. At one point, he shared that he had been coming to CES since he was 16. Astute CES fans will note: You’re supposed to be 18 to get in. “I used a fake ID,” Luckey told a CES audience on Wednesday, to much laughter. “I pretended that I worked for a company that was exhibiting here,” the mogul said.
Cute retro games may be the future but so, too, is war, it would seem. Since 2017, Luckey has largely been focused on his defense startup Anduril. Earlier this year, in the wake of a Series G fundraising round, the company’s valuation swelled to $30.5 billion. Lately, the company has been collaborating with Meta on headsets for the U.S. military.
Anduril hardly came up during Wednesday’s talk, but toward the end of the conversation, Luckey pivoted briefly to a discussion about foreign policy to make some characteristically wild claims. “I was part of the problem for a long time, making all of my stuff in China,” he said. “Geopolitically, the United States and China are going through a divorce; it’s a messy divorce — and if people think that it’s going to end with reconciliation, they’re blind. It’s not,” he said.
