Background information
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by Cassie Mammone
Attention all Commodore lovers: passionate fan has big plans
4/7/2025
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
After it collapsed, the Commodore disappeared from the world stage. Now an ambitious fan has simply bought the company, looking to bring the eighties back to life.
Are you a seventies baby and love technology? Then there’s a good chance you had a Commodore PC in the eighties or nineties, with fond memories intertwined. Commodore was one of the most successful suppliers of computer hardware before the turn of the millennium. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1994, but an enthusiastic fan community continues to keep its memory alive.
One of these fans, British YouTuber Peri Fractic (real name Christian Simpson) has a vision that could now become reality. He bought the Commodore Corporation, including all 47 trademarks still registered. The plan? To revive Commodore as a fan project and fill it with new, retro-futuristic life.
Simpson is now the managing director, with an illustrious team of former Commodore employees and other retro enthusiasts on board. For example, there’s actor Thomas Middleditch, whom you may know from HBO show Silicon Valley. He’s an Atari kid himself and a passionate gamer.
Retro versus the modern tech world
In a very retro and emotional first video from early June, Simpson explains what Commodore means to him: childhood memories with the Commodore computer, which felt like pure magic to his 14-year-old self. At that time, computers became affordable for private individuals for the first time – a sign of optimism, transparency, joy and new possibilities. Today’s tech world, on the other hand, is dominated by overpowered, soulless corporations that have made users addicted to likes, spam them with pop-ups and threaten their jobs with AI.
What Simpson has in mind for Commodore sounds like a utopia. The Commodore reboot is supposed to save us, according to him. He wants to revive the spirit of the eighties with modern retro products. Old and young fans should again feel the joy that he himself had as a teenager with his Commodore 64.
New products should fit in with the old zeitgeist
In both his videos, Simpson repeatedly emphasises that he wants to run the company and the brand in the best interests of the old Commodore and its community. His rules for protecting the brand stipulate that retro computing should be preserved and promoted.
Commodore is now registered as a Public Benefit Corporation, a company that acts in the public interest but is also supposed to make a profit. This is necessary, says Simpson, because he wants to avoid another bankruptcy. To this end, he will rely on dumb, not smart products – still, they should be innovative, a return to the pioneering spirit of the booming home computer era before the turn of the millennium.
Source: Peri Fractic
His plan is to enable hardware manufacturers to develop products under the name Commodore. The company is particularly interested in fan groups that already sell spare parts and novelties for Commodore, but have not been able to licence them. Commodore is expected to receive a 6.4 per cent share of the sales revenue. Instead of cheap mass-produced goods, they want to focus on products with carefully controlled quality that match the brand – by fans, for fans.
Simpson is enthusiastic about bringing new products to market that previously only existed as fan renderings. Augmented reality hardware, for example, is an option, but all under the motto: honour the past, invent the future.
Source: Cem Tezcan
Simpson also (kind of) announces a first product: his video detailing the purchase and the future of Commodore ends with a cliffhanger just as Simpson wants to unveil a new product. It therefore remains to be seen whether a device actually exists.
A passionate team to start things off
Originally, Simpson only wanted to buy the exclusive rights to the Commodore brand. But instead of a licence agreement, Commodore BV, the last owner of the rights to all Commodore brands, offered to sell the entire company. After tough negotiations, a low seven-figure sum was settled on.
So far, however, only a small part of the purchase price has been paid, as Simpson admits. He took out a loan for part of it, while other shares were taken over by angel investors. That’s wealthy private individuals who are passionate about a project and contribute capital and experience. In the future, anyone will be able to participate by purchasing shares.
The new Commodore team includes some fans such as Sean Donohue and Leo Nigro. They run the My Retro Computer project, which sells Commodore-style hardware. Nigro was Chief Technical Officer at Commodore for a time.
Source: Sean Donohue
Other former Commodore officials are also on board: Bill Herd (1982–1986, lead engineer), Michael Tomczyk (1980–1984, assistant to the successful Commodore boss Jack Tramiel), a former product designer, a hardware supporter and other people who held management positions at Commodore. They all offer experience, advice and certainly capital in some cases.
If you feel like it, you can also take part in the project yourself. Simpson states that merchandise designers and a social media manager are still being sought.
Header image: «Perifractic»
Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.
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