Casey Neistat joins ModRetro to champion the M64: building the 'last Nintendo 64 that ever needs to be built'

Summary

Casey Neistat — YouTuber, filmmaker, and investor — has joined ModRetro as an unpaid creative evangelist to help launch the M64, the company's Nintendo 64 revival. His pitch for the product is also its thesis: build the last N64 that ever needs to be built, not another emulator stopgap.

Why ModRetro, why now

Neistat admits he initially dismissed the Chromatic, ModRetro's Game Boy revival, as redundant given the $50 Chinese alternatives on Amazon. A call with Palmer Lucky changed that. Lucky's framing — that ModRetro isn't building another Game Boy but the last Game Boy — landed hard enough that Neistat asked for a role on the spot. They offered him a title but no salary. He took it, and also invested.

The company is tiny, described as a few people in a small office, but Neistat says the product pipeline in their heads is long.

The craft argument

The Chromatic's development illustrates why this is harder than it sounds. Matching the original Game Boy screen required an exhaustive engineering process because modern high-density displays use multiple pixels to fake a single original pixel — meaning Mario lands a half-pixel off from where he should. Neistat says competitors solve this by rotating the screen panel 90 degrees and transforming the output at the last second. ModRetro's CEO Torin and Lucky refused that shortcut. The result is that replicating a 20-year-old screen's fidelity was actually harder than installing the latest display available.

Neistat frames the commercial bet honestly: maybe only "weirdos" care whether Mario is a half-pixel low. But that's the customer ModRetro is after — the same person who buys Teenage Engineering hardware without knowing how to use it because the integrity of the object matters.

The broader design principle

The appeal of durable, non-disposable hardware runs through the conversation. Neistat contrasts his childhood Game Boy — which he found in a drawer, turned on, and it still worked — with every old iPhone he owns, which he has never once felt compelled to power up again. The Game Boy is evergreen; the iPhone is of the moment.

The M64 faces the same design constraint as the Chromatic: where do you stop? Adding USB-C to the Game Boy was defensible. Making the M64 handheld would push it into Switch territory and undermine the whole premise. Nintendo in the early 90s had the advantage of technological limits forcing restraint. ModRetro has to impose that restraint itself.

Wearables and the social friction problem

Neistat is skeptical of always-on camera hardware, and his reasoning is social rather than technical. He was uncomfortable talking openly around a friend wearing the Humane AI Pin. He found the Apple Vision Pro technically staggering but socially unwearable — his wife told him to take it off the same evening he published his glowing review. He argues the Vision Pro's best demo environment is an airplane, but he travels maybe 10 hours a month, which makes a $4,000 device hard to justify even for a frequent traveler.

On Wave's live-streaming glasses, he notes their FAQ confirms the indicator light can be disabled — a detail he finds genuinely queasy. Meta's approach with Ray-Ban frames is smarter, he argues, because the form factor is already socially legible and the recording light is hardware-enforced.

Amazon's acquisition of Be — a bracelet that listens continuously — lands in the same category. Neistat says flatly he won't have friends who wear one.

AI and the content economy

Asked about synthetic influencers, Neistat's take is unsentimental. AI-generated content is a tidal wave, not a trend to manage. His analogy is CGI in film: practical effects advocates lost, hand-drawn animation advocates lost, and AI will win the same way. He predicts the first AI number-one song won't arrive as a soulful Bob Dylan moment — it will arrive as something fun and outrageous, like Gangnam Style, where novelty lets audiences forgive the absence of humanity. Then it chips away from there.

The optimistic read he offers is structural: AI steepens the power law. A handful of distinctly human voices — he names Andrew Huberman as a candidate — will command an extreme premium precisely because they represent something AI cannot replicate. Most of the content landscape, he says, can be replaced. The ones who survive will be worth more for it.