Submitted 1 day ago by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke-Ao-CpI7E
Definitely interested to see their full plan going forward. I never owned a Commodore or an amiga. I had a friend that had a Commodore 64 though. And I always wanted Anamika back in the day just could never afford.
It’s very promising to see all the people old and new he’s got lined up to help.
You can try out commodore OS 3.0, a fan based operating system. www.commodoreos.net/CommodoreOS.aspx
TBH I’m unfamiliar with Fractic, but… this is a joke, right?
If not… well, I still suspect it i. But something about this rang as deeply unserious to me—Fractic’s tone, the repetitiveness, and gimmickery made this seem more like attention-seeking than anything else. I’ll admit it was a bit difficult for me to get through the entire thing without needle-dropping, but gathering the Traveling Willburys of retro computing, dropping Musk’s name, etc, left a lingering smell.
There’s an easily-exploitable misconception that one must just summon the Elder Gods of the Golden Age of <insert current trendy technotetish here>, throw in some hype and money and project management, and magic will happen. That’s not how it works. Just because someone did amazing stuff in the past doesn’t mean they’ll have the ability or the desire to do it in the future—the relative incentives, market conditions, technological constraints, and just plain interests are completely different than before. It’s fun to think one is changing the world and potentially getting rich by pushing the state of the art further than anyone thinks is possible. That’s not where these folks are now.
Would love to be wrong, and having cut my teeth on Commodore kit as a kid, spent a career in CE, and having reached an age when I’m generally just annoyed by youtuber fluff and antics, it’s entirely possible my biases are getting in the way here. I’m sure this guy has fans who are reading this and seeing nothing but an out-of-touch geezer, and maybe they’re right. But I’d have a really hard time forking over any scratch to this guy, and will be astounded if this actually produces more than a curiosity.
Fractic’s tone, the repetitiveness, and gimmickery.
He’s pretty much like that in most of his videos.
Just because someone did amazing stuff in the past doesn’t mean they’ll have the ability or the desire to do it in the future—the relative incentives, market conditions, technological constraints, and just plain interests are completely different than before. It’s fun to think one is changing the world and potentially getting rich by pushing the state of the art further than anyone thinks is possible. That’s not where these folks are now.
This I completely agree with. From what I can tell he’s established relationships with these folk over the years during his coverage of C64 content, and likely felt having them be a part of this would legitimize it and make it feel like the ‘real’ commodore, but time and time again, when I’ve seen old legends try their hands at recapturing the magic of their past, it rarely seems to work out (a good example would be every ex-Sierra employee trying to make a new game with a kickstarter, all of which resulted in pretty sub-par stuff).
But I’d have a really hard time forking over any scratch to this guy, and will be astounded if this actually produces more than a curiosity.
I’m of the same mind.
I don’t think Frantic has any sort of bad intentions or scheme planned (he’s been steadily making classic computer content for over 7 years now), but I do think he’s completely blinded by nostalgia, and is wildly overestimating the commercial viability of the goals he has in mind.
If he really did refinance his house to help fund all this, I don’t foresee things going too well for him, as I can’t really imagine them being able to put to market something that will be affordable enough and with some killer feature to truly capture a wide enough market. I also would love to be proven wrong here, but based on how the Commander X16 went, I suspect whatever they produce will be far too overpriced for what it actually is, and will end up only appealing to a small subset of similarly nostalgic Gen-x’ers who have the disposable income to get into it, similar to the Spectrum NEXT.
Grew up with a C64, I remember Zork and so many text adventures and some very unforgiving dungeon crawlers but also a cool music keyboard overlay and a program called Kawasaki Synthesizer that let you program and use the awesome SID synthesizer chip that the C64 came with. Later my brother and then a friend I met on a local BBS had Amigas (500 and 1200). Spent a lot of time watching demos and getting into tracker music. Definitely had a major impression on me growing up as I’m a big synth nut now. Hope he does something decent with it, certainly the brand deserves some love.
xyzzy@lemm.ee 18 hours ago
In 2014, some of us at a small company with disposable income discovered that Winamp was on the market for a relatively small amount of money (as compared to our profits). We all had fond memories of it and we had a team capable of doing something interesting with it.
The problem was we couldn’t figure out anything interesting to do with it. We could think of a ton of things we could do, but we couldn’t think of a good business model around any of them—by which I mean profitable, not just eking by.
In the end, it just wasn’t worth our time. We were better off having half the company prototype new product ideas than sink our resources into this one.
The company that did eventually buy Winamp added an NFT marketplace to it.
It seems like Frantic got stuck at the step of nostalgia plus things he could do and didn’t think too hard about business models and profitability. Leveraging his house is a bad sign, because it implies he lacks the financial resources to do much with Commodore beyond buying the brand.
My guess? He’ll try to put together a new computer aimed at nostalgia seekers, it will underperform, and he’ll pivot to selling branded merchandise for a while until he eventually sells the brand at a loss.