A Retro YouTuber Wants to Take over Commodore. Yes, He's Serious

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Today in Tedium: The difference between being a fan that simply likes something and one that wants to keep that thing alive is a massive gulf. It’s the difference between going into a store and buying a finished product, and having to figure out a business model for it and deal with customer support headaches. If that company sells products, you’re suddenly in the manufacturing business, and that can prove immensely frustrating. And then you have to make clear that your motives are legit, that you can keep running the thing. That’s a lot to take on. But recently, Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson, a retro-tech YouTuber, decided to do just that, revealing that he and some business partners were interested in taking over the Commodore brand. I was curious—so I reached out. Via fax. And once we connected via 21st century technology, I found a highly passionate guy who decided to follow through on a dream. Today’s Tedium discusses the prospect of a Commodore megafan running a legendary computer brand. — Ernie @ Tedium

five

The number of times the Commodore brand has been sold since the original company went bankrupt in 1994. The ownership picture is particularly murky, with a complex list of acquisitions and at-times questionable branding approaches. (At one point, the Commodore chicken-lips logo was used to sell a portable media player called the Gravel in Pocket, which people thought was a weird name even back then.)

As far as I can tell, this is a 100% serious thing. Here’s how he got the offer

To start off, I will concede that this is YouTube; it is a place known for stunts. Peri Fractic and his wife/cohost Lady Fractic have been known for a few. (They have one of the better April Fool’s games I’ve seen on the platform—the 2024 edition, which starts out as a legitimate video, has a particularly funny twist.)

I won’t downplay that in my coverage here. But talking to Peri Fractic—previously Perifractic, one word—it’s clear that his attempt to acquire Commodore is not a stunt—and that his audience, for the most part, immediately caught the difference.

Close watchers of his channel Retro Recipes probably noticed that something was up. In recent months, episodes of the show have been thrown to other YouTube creators more than usual, and he’s been on the road for many of the videos he did appear in. Most notably, when he shot his Commodore announcement video, part of a multipart series, he started by appearing on a brand-new set.

But in case it was not clear from the video, he is well-invested in the idea of potentially taking over Commodore, both emotionally and financially.

“Now, I won’t go into too many details, but we basically took out a second mortgage on our house to get this done,” he says. “It’s been seven months, nearly eight months of work, actually.”

The roots of this emerged back in October. After years of videos covering Commodore 64 clones, Peri Fractic found himself featuring a product from a company, My Retro Computer, that actually went to the trouble of getting the machine officially licensed. Problem was, the license was expensive, and they nearly dropped the Commodore name, but Peri Fractic convinced them to keep it. The resulting Retro Recipes video became his most popular video about Commodore, which is notable because a lot of his videos are about Commodore. The video’s resulting popularity created a discussion about sublicensing the Commodore brand from the current owners, with the goal of making it more accessible for hardware hackers.

Peri Fractic admits that his most recent video—which went further, teasing the possibility of a Commodore acquisition—takes a little artistic license for entertainment/story framing reasons, but that the basic shape of what happened is “99% true.” He did hear back from the owners, with them suggesting they would be interested in selling the company.

“I, however, put the seed out there first to them,” he says.

The way he describes it was that he led with a three-tier strategy to collaborate with them:

A licensing agreement that would have allowed Peri Fractic’s team to sublicense the Commodore brand to the community.
A CEO or community liaison-style role in the current organization, in which he and his collaborators would work directly with the existing team, in exchange for a stake in the company.
A small note at the bottom proposing outright purchase, though, given the recent whirlwind of recent events, he now says he’s hazy on whether he even wrote it. “Now I’m second guessing whether I said that or not, because I watched the end of the video so many times while editing it, that I believe they reached out first,” he says.

The current team, based in the Netherlands, responded back, expressing interest in the first two options, but surprisingly, also interest in the third.

“I think they said, ‘If the right offer came along …we might be open to selling you the whole company—it was like they winked at us and flicked their hair,’” he says. “So [the video] was very close, but I sort of I made it more entertaining than reading an email screenshot on a screen.”

Whatever happened after that is not completely final at the moment—he’s going to drop the news in a series of videos, the next of which is expected to hit on July 28th. Ultimately, it’s clear that a lot of pieces have already been put into place. Example: He says that he has spent $11,000 on a Commodore.net domain. (Based on a quick search of the Internet Archive, the domain was previously associated with the Commodore brand but has not been used for that reason for more than a decade.)

Per Peri Fractic, fan response has been massive and emotional. The video has seen nearly a quarter of a million views.

“If I type in my keyword search for comments—praying or bawling, or tears—there’ll be hundreds of such comments,” he says.

It’s clear whatever’s on the agenda is more than just another April Fool’s video. (For one thing, it’s June.)

Five questions about a proposed Commodore acquisition a Commodore enthusiast is likely to have

What about the Amiga? The Commodore brand was separated from the Amiga line nearly three decades ago, and while the Amiga has slowed somewhat in recent years, the scene is very much alive. Peri Fractic says he has been in touch with Mike Battilana, the owner of the Amiga brand and its primary software distributor, Cloanto. “Mike and I are probably the two people who share that strongest will to put the pieces of the jigsaw back together,” he says.
What about the Commander X16? A few years back, Peri Fractic was closely associated with a Commodore-like hobbyist computer, the Commander X16. (He even, in past videos, revealed that he came up with its name. Then, he did an April Fool’s joke about that name—because of course he did.) He later left the project, which is being led by The 8-Bit Guy, David Murray. Peri Fractic says they are still in touch and that a potential offer to collaborate is on the table.
Can I crowdfund this thing? One thing that the recent Retro Recipes video makes clear is that there was a desire to run a crowdfunding effort using the platform StartEngine, which is associated with former Activision Studios and Acclaim executive Howard Marks. Peri Fractic says that while the discussions with Marks’ firm didn’t work out, in part because of Commodore’s foreign ownership, they haven’t given up on the prospect. “We’re actually really trying. We might have a solution,” he says.
Wait, there’s another Commodore on Google. Close observers will notice that an Italian company uses the Commodore name. During the 2010s, when the Commodore brand was largely dormant, multiple firms in Italy took on the brand’s name, though the version Peri Fractic is looking to buy is the one tied to the brand’s 1980s legacy. (This Nostalgia Nerd article explains what happened.) “We are optimistic about reaching a solution that benefits everyone involved,” Peri Fractic says.
Will there be new hardware? Nothing has officially been announced, but given that this all started because My Retro Computer licensed the Commodore name for a hardware product, it certainly seems possible. And the prospect of future tech isn’t off the table, either. Peri Fractic points to the company Voxon, which builds a 3D hologram display, as an inspiration of sorts. “That’s the kind of stuff that feels like it would be what Commodore would make,” he says.

The prospects of a fan-to-CEO pipeline for Commodore

As I said at the beginning, it is not a normal thing for a fan to take over a beloved brand. But it has happened before. One notable example in the Tedium archives is that of Hydrox, which was acquired and reformulated by a childhood fan after he realized the trademarks had expired and were up for grabs.

But simply having an enthusiasm for a brand doesn’t necessarily give you the tools to support it. So what makes Peri Fractic a good choice for leading a revival?

He points to his strong ties to the community, thanks to his YouTube channel—along with the understanding it has given him of that community.

Peri Fractic started his channel as a Commodore channel—his earliest videos started with C64 repairs, but that eventually evolved into a unique mix of pop culture and retro tech. And gradually, his wife got more involved in the channel. But Commodore never went away. One of his early hit projects, for example, was a Commodore 64 case made with LEGO bricks. Even the sprung keyboard was made of LEGOs.

“What I realized is I’m the sort of most common type of Commodore fan,” he says.

That’s a different point of view, from, say, Bil Herd, the Commodore 128 designer who has found a degree of YouTube fame thanks to his periodic appearances on the Hackaday channel. And it wasn’t like he was doing homebrew, either, like The 8-Bit Guy was doing. His videos paint a guy who really loves reliving his 10-year-old computing experience and learned a few things along the way.

“Like, I wasn’t making games and selling them. I didn’t work for Commodore,” he says. “I was just a kid in the bedroom who bought a Commodore 64, then an Amiga, then another Amiga. I was just there, along for the whole ride, basically.”

And armed with the knowledge that more than seven years of YouTube comments have given him, he realized he is well-positioned to put the brand where its primary fans actually are.

“I have formed a very solid opinion of I think what the majority Commodore fan wants—and what I found most of the time was it defaulted to what I wanted,” he adds.

Not everyone is a fan of what’s happening here, to be clear.

I will note that not everyone has jumped on board the Peri-Fractic-buying-Commodore train. One critic I spotted on YouTube, Brad Hodge of the channel Tech Time Traveller, raised pointed questions about whether the brand would even be viable.

“Honestly, I’m not sure why you’d want the trouble,” Hodge stated in a response video. “Gatekeeping a brand means making almost as many enemies as you make friends.”

All that said, this doesn’t appear to be a decision made lightly.

Case in point: It is very easy to figure out, with a couple of Google searches, that Peri Fractic has worked regularly in the entertainment industry for more than a quarter-century. But he has largely avoided making it the center of his YouTube work—saying, mostly as a memetic joke peppered in his videos, “I don’t like to talk about it.”

However, having to raise money for a bold pitch has put him in an unusual situation where he’s having to bring that stuff up, on the advice of folks like Jeri Ellsworth. (Ellsworth’s C64 hardware hacking—a scene she’s still passionate about—eventually led to the augmented reality work of Tilt Five.)

“Hand on heart, I’m extremely modest, and I’ve had to pitch to a lot of investors lately,” he says. The advice he got: “You have to talk about yourself, front and center, because people invest in people—they don’t invest in the product foremost.”

If someone is going to make a real effort to revive Commodore, is Peri Fractic your guy? That’s the case he’s been making.

Starting or building a company means making a bet on yourself and seeing it through. It is not something that one does lightly.

And if you’re building something that a lot of people are going to be interested in, you need buy-in. It won’t work without it. You may need to put in your own money—a lot of it.

In talking to investors, Peri Fractic has had to lean into his story arc. He’s a guy who knows how to make dreams happen for himself. That arc has led him to do things like work on Star Wars movies and buy a Knight Rider KITT replica. He accepts interview requests via fax. It’s a vibe, and in the right light, a compelling one.

All this has allowed him to build a successful YouTube channel. Now, it appears to be leading him in the general direction of Commodore.

But in many ways, if this acquisition goes through, the hard part comes after. He will have to convince companies and hobbyists that licensing the Commodore brand is a net positive for them. If they go down the route of new products, he has to figure out how to manufacture and sell them. He may need to hire a team to make everything happen.

It’s not the same as simply being a fan who simply enjoys a company’s work.

“My job is that this doesn’t become another bankrupt Commodore,” he says. “So I have to really push that mission.”

But given that what we’ve seen from the Commodore brand in the three decades since it first went bankrupt, maybe it’s a bet this legendary brand needs.

Thanks to Peri Fractic for the time and opportunity to talk about what sounds like a very ambitious experiment in fan ownership.

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