You might think it\u2019s 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 \u201ctech nostalgia.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The catch, however, is that Luckey and Ohanian weren\u2019t 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\u2019s \u2014 and it\u2019s the styles and form factor of the past that will determine tech\u2019s future, they claimed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just about nostalgia for the old; it\u2019s about the fact that it\u2019s just objectively better,\u201d Ohanian said of some older products.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThere is something that used to exist in the intentionality of building a music library \u2014 whether that was building whole albums or building mix tapes,\u201d Luckey said, adding that, in the era of endless downloads, you clearly \u201close something.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luckey also pointed to younger people who are nostalgic for time periods that they don\u2019t even remember or have any personal connection to. \u201cWhy do they think it\u2019s good? It\u2019s not because they\u2019re remembering their childhoods. It\u2019s not because they\u2019re harkening back to some earlier time. It\u2019s because they\u2019re recognizing that it is literally better, some of this old stuff.\u201d <\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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 \u2014 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<\/a> that debuted at CES this year).<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco Given that consumer interests are trending this direction, Luckey and Ohanian\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Indeed, Luckey has already been doing this. The defense contractor, who sports an \u201980s mullet<\/a>, launched a project in 2024 called ModRetro Chromatic<\/a> \u2014 a Game Boy-like device that retails for $199, allows gameplay of old cartridge classics from the 1990s, and has been called one of \u201cthe best ever made<\/a>\u201d of its kind.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s gaming company, has also said he\u2019s interested in creating his own vintage-style game.<\/p>\n There were a lot of colorful moments during Wednesday\u2019s 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\u2019re supposed to be 18 to get in. \u201cI used a fake ID,\u201d Luckey told a CES audience on Wednesday, to much laughter. \u201cI pretended that I worked for a company that was exhibiting here,\u201d the mogul said.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s valuation swelled to $30.5 billion<\/a>. Lately, the company has been collaborating with Meta on\u00a0headsets for the U.S. military<\/a>.<\/p>\n Anduril hardly came up during Wednesday\u2019s talk, but toward the end of the conversation, Luckey pivoted briefly to a discussion about foreign policy to make some characteristically wild claims. \u201cI was part of the problem for a long time, making all of my stuff in China,\u201d he said. \u201cGeopolitically, the United States and China are going through a divorce; it\u2019s a messy divorce \u2014 and if people think that it\u2019s going to end with reconciliation, they\u2019re blind. It\u2019s not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You might think it\u2019s pretty weird to hear the founders of a VR company and a social media…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[108523,108548,85,46,125,340,341,342],"class_list":{"0":"post-227823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-ces","9":"tag-ces-2026","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-virtual-reality","14":"tag-virtualreality","15":"tag-vr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n