this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
64 points (98.5% liked)
retrocomputing
5086 readers
102 users here now
Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
TBH I'm unfamiliar with Fractic, but... this is a joke, right?
If not... well, I still suspect it i. But something about this rang as deeply unserious to me—Fractic's tone, the repetitiveness, and gimmickery made this seem more like attention-seeking than anything else. I'll admit it was a bit difficult for me to get through the entire thing without needle-dropping, but gathering the Traveling Willburys of retro computing, dropping Musk's name, etc, left a lingering smell.
There's an easily-exploitable misconception that one must just summon the Elder Gods of the Golden Age of , throw in some hype and money and project management, and magic will happen. That's not how it works. Just because someone did amazing stuff in the past doesn't mean they'll have the ability or the desire to do it in the future—the relative incentives, market conditions, technological constraints, and just plain interests are completely different than before. It's fun to think one is changing the world and potentially getting rich by pushing the state of the art further than anyone thinks is possible. That's not where these folks are now.
Would love to be wrong, and having cut my teeth on Commodore kit as a kid, spent a career in CE, and having reached an age when I'm generally just annoyed by youtuber fluff and antics, it's entirely possible my biases are getting in the way here. I'm sure this guy has fans who are reading this and seeing nothing but an out-of-touch geezer, and maybe they're right. But I'd have a really hard time forking over any scratch to this guy, and will be astounded if this actually produces more than a curiosity.
He's pretty much like that in most of his videos.
This I completely agree with. From what I can tell he's established relationships with these folk over the years during his coverage of C64 content, and likely felt having them be a part of this would legitimize it and make it feel like the 'real' commodore, but time and time again, when I've seen old legends try their hands at recapturing the magic of their past, it rarely seems to work out (a good example would be every ex-Sierra employee trying to make a new game with a kickstarter, all of which resulted in pretty sub-par stuff).
I'm of the same mind.
I don't think Frantic has any sort of bad intentions or scheme planned (he's been steadily making classic computer content for over 7 years now), but I do think he's completely blinded by nostalgia, which is an ever pervasive theme in his videos, and is ultimately wildly overestimating the commercial viability of the goals he has in mind.
If he really did refinance his house to help fund all this, I don't foresee things going too well for him, as I can't really imagine them being able to put to market something that will be affordable enough and with some killer feature to truly capture a wide enough market. I also would love to be proven wrong here, but based on how the Commander X16 went, I suspect whatever they produce will be far too overpriced for what it actually is, and will end up only appealing to a small subset of similarly nostalgic Gen-x'ers who have the disposable income to get into it, similar to the Spectrum NEXT.