It happened again. The name “Commodore” has been dug out of its shallow grave, dusted off, and paraded down Main Street to the applause of anyone. For a fleeting, naive moment, some of us dared to hope. Because I’ve been watching RetroRecipes YouTube channel for many years and I thought that Commodore would continue where it stopped in 1994. But instead they have taken a Medhi Ali route by launching a new Commodore 64 and a new smartphone. Why no Amiga product? Yes, I am disappointed!
Could this revival mean a true return to the company’s real golden age? It could have if they came up with ideas for new Amiga 5000 or Amiga 6500 etc? These new Amiga’s could have well built-in support for Commodore 64 games like the Vampire V4 machine which can act as a Atari if you hold down the Joystick button while booting. But that hasn’t been put into reality at all by the new Commodore. Instead they feed the world with retro and smartphones that has nothing to do with the Amiga.
Instead of getting what Amigan’s really wanted, the new Commodore released a time machine with the dial permanently stuck backward. It is nice to revive the Commodore 64, but in 1994 Commodore focused on Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000, Amiga CD32 and in the end Amiga 4000T! Amiga should have been the first priority. But even the smartphone got no Amiga checkmark or boingball feeling too, even though SailfishOS have taken many ideas from AmigaOS as MeeGo was its pre-operating system.
Don’t get me wrong: the Commodore 64 Ultimate is a marvelous bit of FPGA engineering. Hunting down the original 1986 injection molds for the C64C casing is just an dull impressive feat of logistics. Why not continue on the breadbox version of Commodore 64 if you wanted to to understand retro interested users. But even on that level, you fail.
I didn’t fall in love with Commodore because of a corporate logo; I must admit that the community loved it because of the visionary engineering of Jay Miner, Dave Haynie, and RJ Mical.
What made Commodore great wasn’t safety; it was audacity. It was pushing the envelope of what a personal computer could do, years before the rest of the industry even understood the questions. To watch the brand resurrected just to milk the lowest-common-denominator nostalgia of BASIC prompts and custom keycaps feels like a betrayal of everything the Amiga stood for.
If the current custodians truly want to honor the legacy they purchased, they need to stop looking at what Commodore was and start imagining what Commodore would be today. Until they step out from the shadow of the 8-bit era and build something genuinely disruptive, this isn’t a hardware revolution.
I wish that the new Commodore started to talk with the new Amiga company and give the platform the multimedia vibe it deserves.
I thought RetroRecipes would do something for the Amiga community. But nothing! It’s just a boutique museum gift shop. How about a news Amiga smartphone with AROS on it? There are AndroidOS builds of AROS. Commodore could do something amazing things together with Amiga. Not only on smartphone level but also releasing perfect Amiga computers for video editing. Create a new Amiga CD720 console?
What do you think?
Editorial Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of this publication or its staff. This is an independent commentary on the current state of the brand.
