Byline: STEVE KUPFERMAN; Staff

Palmer Luckey, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who founded Anduril Industries, a defence contractor that builds killer drones, is in the midst of launching a new product.

It's a hand-held device packed with high-tech circuitry, enclosed in a sleek magnesiumalloy shell with a sapphire crystal face. This US$199 device, called the Chromatic, has only one function: It plays decadesold video-game cartridges originally designed for the Nintendo Game Boy.

In a launch video for the device, Mr. Luckey notes that all these high-end features "are fundamentally irrational from a money-making perspective." The Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, were released in 1989 and 1998, respectively, and are two of the bestselling video-game consoles of all time.

They were made out of plastic, for kids, and not designed to outlast the childhoods of their original owners. But the Chromatic, Mr. Luckey says, is "the ultimate way to play Game Boy games," and will "last for generations as a piece of heirloom-grade tribute art."

Mr. Luckey is the latest entrant into a small but booming segment of the video-game industry that caters to devotees of some of the earliest games - the titles whose rudimentary graphics and looping background melodies burrowed into the brains of a generation of children, now middle-aged and beginning to feel the ache of nostalgia.

For Mr. Luckey and other technologists, nostalgia is an engineering problem to be solved.

The market is now teeming with devices that make a paradoxical promise: They will revive and even improve old video games without compromising the original experience of playing them.

A mini-industry has sprouted around the idea that technology, which usually looks to the future, can also recapture feelings from the past.

The Chromatic is at least the second high-end Game Boy modernization to be released in the past five years. And other companies, along with a hobbyist...