If you’ve ever seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you’ll remember Charlie Bucket’s joyous disbelief when (Spoiler Alert!), Willy Wonka tells him that he’s giving him the chocolate factory. Those emotions have no doubt been felt by Christian Simpson, the Commodore superfan YouTuber who has orchestrated the purchase of the Commodore trademarks and who has become the co-founder and CEO of the “new” Commodore.
Simpson has wasted little time in getting the band back together to launch a low-risk proposition, a reincarnation of the Commodore 64 with a few crucial nods to modern connectivity such as USB and HDMI. The Commodore 64. However, Commodore 64 fans recently had a crack at a reliving the product’s glory days via The C64, which, while designed primarily as a video game machine and based on emulation, can run virtually all Commodore 64 software. It even includes a VIC-20 mode!. (The company behind TheC64 also produced The Spectrum recreation of the ZX Spectrum, but hasn’t sold it in the U.S.)
In contrast, few of the Commodore 64’s contemporaries have gotten much in the way of a 21st Century reboot. In contrast to the beloved breadbox, enshrined as the best-selling computer model of all time, Sean Harrington has taken on one of the least popular computers of all time, the Mattel Aquarius. And since at least 2023, a Polish team called Revive Machines has been looking to do for the Atari 800XL what the new Commodore has done for the Commodore 64. Last month, they showed that they are getting close.