retrocomputing

Fractic’s tone, the repetitiveness, and gimmickery.

He's pretty much like that in most of his videos.

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.

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).

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.

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.