Commodore Returns with New Gaming PCs

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

[gEvil (beta)]

I have a feeling this is doomed to fail. Anyone who is old enough to remember when Commodore was a decent gaming platform has probably grown into the type of person who builds his own machines. And the Amiga users will just sit there reminiscing about the good old days...

Nostalgic name, but that's it.

[Rob T Firefly]

I hate to be the cynical one this early in the morning, but it's worth noting that the Commodore brand name has been bought, sold, lost, found, and liquidated ridiculously often [wikipedia.org] since its 1980s heyday. The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.

Re:Atari was a better system

[Disoculated]

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...

[newrisejohn]

Macs are just another PC - despite this people still froth at the mouth for them. Maybe Commodore is trying to build on whatever brand power is left. (I am a Mac user and used to be a C64/C128 user, fyi)

Re:In separate news...

[mdwh2]

I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.

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

[Zedrick]

I put a nice, thick Commodore sticker on my homebuilt 64-bit desktop.

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.

[mdwh2]

The current owners of the Commodore logo and brand name have about as much connection with the people who made the C64 and VIC20 as the current telephone companies have with Alexander Graham Bell.

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.

[mdwh2]

Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.

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.