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Phones and Phonies

Commodore Shenanigans Through The Ages

June 2026

Phoning it in?

A year ago, in June 2025, youtuber Christian Simpson announced his acquisition of the Commodore brand. At the time, the business idea seemed to be to sub-license said brand to various independent hardware manufacturers. I speculated a bit about this back then, but there seems to have been a strategic pivot since, and no sub-licensing materialized. Instead, we've seen the launch of the Commodore 64 Ultimate.

The Ultimate is a brand new C64-compatible computer built around already existing offerings in the form of a case, a keyboard and an FPGA hardware implementation. The Commodore-branded version brings them all together in a convenient bundle and sales have, at the time of writing, just about surpassed 26,000 units. This is well-deserved: It's a good product offered at an attractive price.

Since the launch of the C64 Ultimate, there's been much speculation about what the next product would - or should - be. My view, then as now, is that the Commodore brand is at best a thin veneer, and that it's not required to create great new retro hardware or selling attractive machine bundles - as proven by the Commander X16, MEGA 65, Minimig, MiSTer FPGA, Retro Games' THEC64, and many more. The fun and magic we associate with these old machines is created by ourselves, not by a logo on their case.

In my previous text about the brand acquisition, I mused about "the inevitable course of action to branch out into other ventures, diluting the brand and possibly alienating the core fanbase." This is exactly what seems to have happened with the latest product launch - a flip phone named Callback.

The first ever Commodore branded phone, from 1983, was created to circumvent Canadian telecomms legislation. Full story (and image source) available here.

The Callback is a modern-ish phone in a retro-ish flip phone case, with the unique selling point that social media and web browsing are completely disabled at the system level. No more Facebook, Google and Instagram in your pocket: a "digital detox" device with modest specs and a tiny screen, but a rather hefty introductory price of $500. The reception has been mixed, to say the least - but to understand why, we must take a stroll down memory lane.

Commodore Shenanigans Through the Ages

After Commodore went bust in 1994, German PC manufacturer ESCOM eventually won the bidding war over its remains. This made sense, since original Commodore-branded PC:s had been popular in Germany, where Commodore had also operated a large factory. ESCOM then expanded too rapidly, bought a chain of UK computer stores, and went bankrupt in 1996. At this point, the Commodore brand and other intellectual property went separate ways: Tulip Computers acquired the brand, and Gateway 2000 bought the rest of the intellectual property (including rights to the Amiga brand, operating system code, and much more). Since then, these subdivided IP estates have bounced around between various more or less incompetent and/or legally belligerent actors.

Thus, before Simpson bought the Commodore brand, it was widely acknowledged that it had become something of a bad joke, recycled for a variety of purposes and slapped on everything from document shredders to MP3 players - some good, some bad. Below are a few of the more interesting ones:

Commodore Multimedia Keyboard and Commodore MIDI Keyboard (1997?)

These are possibly from the time when Tulip Computers owned the Commodore brand and put it on everything under the sun.

Commodore 64 Web-IT (1998)

An "appliance" computer for web surfing and email, woefully underpowered for the C64 emulator that was dutifully bundled along with it. It's claimed somewhere that ESCOM licensed the Commodore brand to the Web-IT manufacturer, but this doesn't add up with the timeline: ESCOM went bankrupt in 1996, and Tulip acquired the Commodore brand in 1997.

C64 Direct-to-TV (2004)

An ASIC implementation of a C64, stuck inside a joystick that connected directly to a TV set. It sold like hotcakes, not just because it offered affordable casual gaming, but also because passionate hardware engineer Jeri Ellsworth snuck some updated hardware features in there, along with solder points for floppy- and keyboard connectors. Appreciated by normies and die-hard fanatics alike, this is one of the few truly successful products sanctioned by previous brand holders.

Commodore PCM30 (2005)

This is a small media player with 30 gigs of storage, released during the heydays of DivX movie piracy. Various MP3 players were also launched around the same time. Whether or not these devices sold in any significant quantities is hard to say, but if they did, it's safe to assume it wasn't because of the brand.

Commodore 64x PC (2011, 2021)

A modern...