Commodore Is Being Resurrected By Peri Fractic: “We’re Doing It For The Love Of The Brand”
Noted Youtuber Peri Fractic (the Retro Recipes channel) recently revealed that his plan to buy renowned computer brand Commodore has been a success; he’s assembled a team with decades of experience with the name, and is now personally acting as the CEO of Commodore.
Commodore has had a tumultuous time since the original company disappeared in the mid-nineties, with its 47 separate trademarks scattered between multiple other companies. Peri, real name Christian Simpson, revealed on June 7 that his plan was to try and buy Commodore, and his recent video update on June 28 provided an insight into his vision for the company.
“We’re Commodore now. We should start the same way Commodore started, by selling really cool stuff,” he said. “But, you see, the other Commodore iterations, they’ve been doing it for the money. They didn’t own Commodores as kids, most of them. But we’re doing it for the love of the brand and the technology. And I genuinely believe, if you approach things that way, you just can’t fail.”
The Fall And Rise of Commodore
Commodore is a name that means a lot to older gamers, but younger people may not realise the impact it had. Consider how popular PlayStation is nowadays; that’s not dissimilar to what Commodore was like in its hey day. So why did it fall from grace and seemingly vanish?
The short answer is: bankruptcy. The slightly longer one builds on its initial reputation as a cultural juggernaut in the eighties. It outsold contemporary computer systems by Apple and Atari, with its flagship C64 device still holding the Guinness World Record for Best-Selling Desktop: a staggering 12,500,000 units (although there are reports that it may well have sold over double that if Commodore’s original CEO, Jack Tramiel, is to be believed).
Commodore released the Amiga 1000 in 1985, as its first in a range of affordable, technologically-advanced home computers. However, by the mid-nineties, its attempts to market Amiga games consoles (mainly the CDTV and CD32) fell flat, as rival devices by the likes of Nintendo and Sega were on the rise.
Commodore entered into voluntary liquidation in 1994, and the brand was subsequently bought by a company called Escom. The name then changed hands multiple times, fragmenting into 47 separate trademarks along the way. Fast forward to June 2025, and a Dutch company called Net BV owns these trademarks. Or it did: Peri Fractic now owns all Commodore trademarks.
Bringing Retro Computing Into The Future
Commodore (and Amiga, although that name has an equally convoluted legal history) never actually disappeared completely, though. There have been individuals and companies using Commodore’s name under licence to make new versions of its tech, as well as replacement parts such as processors and keyboards.
“Wouldn’t it be great if they all came together,” Fractic said in a video in October 2024. “I’d love to create a conglomerate – call it the Commglomerate or something like that – that houses everything, and we could all just be friends, yeah, instead of the little squabbles that keep happening.”
He has achieved this, by bringing in not just the old guard (original Commodore employees) but new blood that have been keeping the name alive by making new tech with the Commodore name. It’s all tied into Fractic’s core ideal, of “Honoring the past, innovating the future,” as he puts it.
“Do you remember how tech felt in the late 90s and early 2000s? Sort of ‘techno optimism,’ they call it. It was retrofuturistic, fresh, inviting. No pop-ups and overflowing inboxes, and boring black rectangles that all look the same and took our attention away from our loved ones.”
“All that transparent tech and metallic clothing symbolized and reflected clarity, hope, and freedom,” he added. “Social media stands for the opposite: toxicity, distraction, addiction, and harm. It just all went wrong. Technology that was meant to help us, we became enslaved to it. It just went too far.”
“So in our story, in my vision, Commodore has blipped back to this reality from the early 2000s, late 90s, to save us from that. Simply, to give us the future we were promised.”
In terms of what people can actually expect from Commodore going forward, Frantic has promised his viewers that they’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the research and development aspect of new tech. He’s also called out for merchandise designers and game license holders (for eighties/nineties properties) to get in touch, as well as teasing that some new games are in the works.
As for what these games will be played on, he’s saving the reveal of the new Commodore device for a later date.
