It's been announced that the legendary brand Commodore is to be revived with a range of high-spec gaming PC's.

The end of an era

In the mid-90's, Commodore International announced that it had been unable to renegotiate terms of its outstanding loans and was closing up shop. April 20, 1995, Commodore was sold to the German company ESCOM for approximately 10 to 12.5 million dollars. During the summer of 1996, however, ESCOM also fell into recievership. Eventually Gateway 2000 Computers Purchases the Technologies of Commodore/Amiga and Tulip of Holland purchase the Commodore Trademark¹. Fast-forward ten years, enter CIC (Commodore International Corporation). From their corporate site:

From concept to corporation

The basis for CIC was laid in 2004, when SATXS Communications BV, a pioneer of digital distribution and live streaming, joined forces with Yeahronimo NV, the first legal download platform in the Netherlands, to form Yeahronimo Media Ventures Inc (YMV). The aim of the merger was to integrate advances in content provision with state-of-the-art digital distribution services.

Consumer electronics hardware was added to this mix when YMV acquired the worldwide rights to the Commodore brand name, assets and patents from Tulip Computers early in 2005. This move marked the official start of Commodore International Corporation.

"25 years ago, Commodore launched the best selling personal computer of the late 20th Century, the C64, and defined the early computer games experience for millions of people worldwide," said Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming. "We are privileged and excited to bring the Commodore brand back to the gaming community and mark a new chapter in its history with this exceptional machine. We're sure that it will deliver what gamers need and want."

The new Commodore PCs optimised 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. Commodore Gaming is to make further announcements at the launch and promises that there are still some very exciting aspects of the product still to be revealed.²

What is your take on this? Does Commodore have plans to publish proprietary content that can only be played on their custom PC?? Are they planning a complete line of desktops and laptops in the future? What reason besides nostalgia would you want to buy one of their computers? What could be the magic ingredient to make them successful upon reentry into the marketplace?

1. Chronology of Commodore History, Jack Tramiel [↩]
2. via Pro-G [↩]