Commodore Returns with New Gaming PCs 281
JamesO writes "Commodore is a name which will bring memories flooding back to many a gamer and it's been announced that the legendary brand is to return with a new range of high specification gaming PCs.
The new Commodore PCs optimized for gaming will be launched at the CeBIT show in Germany on March 15 and attendees will be offered the chance to play the latest PC games using the purpose-built PCs."
just a hunch (Score:5, Insightful)
Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Atari was a better system (Score:5, Insightful)
I owned just about every home computer of that era, and the 800 was definitely second best to the C64. It should have been, it was much older. A steel frame only counts for so much.
On the other hand, there really isn't anything in this article about what the new 'Commodore' gaming computers really are... and it sounds like just more leeching off of a dead name.
Re:In separate news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In separate news... (Score:2, Insightful)
You do realise that there have been Commodore PCs before - in that Commodore when it existed as a company made PCs?
There was a lot more to the Commodore brand than the Commodore 64, and all this is is reusing the brand. Is it pointless to use such a seemingly old brand? Well, it nonetheless seems to be getting them lots of extra publicity, which is really the whole point of using well known brandnames...
And as someone else pointed out, this isn't really any different to using the Macintosh brand for more than one platform (multiple CPU changes, and more notably, two entirely different operating systems). Apple did it because they knew that a "Mac" would have better chance than a new "NeXT".
Already have one (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just as much "Commodore" as these machines. Perhaps even more so, since I've also got a real C-1541 connected to it.
Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to business. This is true with an awful lot of brandnames. They get bought and sold (e.g., in the UK, the cable company NTL recently renamed to Virgin Media, but it's still basically NTL and not Virgin). But then, even within the same company, over a period of decades you often won't have the same people working there anymore, so it's hard to see there's really a connection, plus of course, even whole companies can be bought and sold, not to mention made public, so often the "current owners" have nothing to do with the people who originally started it.
I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.
Re:Nostalgic name, but that's it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, you can point to some companies where important guys are still around, but similarly there are other brands used where the original guys involved have long since left (Atari would be one example).
Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built.
As I do too - although there isn't just the case of brand loyalty, there's also brand awareness. Consider the free marketing they get with using this brand...
As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.
See my reply to that comment.