How one Star Wars actor became the CEO of Commodore

0:00My philosophy is we need to build Commodore into the same level as Google and Apple. C64s alone, we've sold over 27 ,000 of those machines, which is mind-blowing, right? For a 40-year-old computer. Yeah. So that's been amazing. But what was really interesting was when we launched the phone, that did the same in its first weekend as the C64 did in its first three months. Our whole philosophy here is we do retro and we do future. Yeah. We do the two hand in hand.

0:30Hello there and welcome to The Game Business Show. This is our Tuesday edition of the show. This is where we do our big interviews of the week and they're completely free for everybody. So if you want to listen to them on your podcasting platform, you want to watch them on YouTube, watch it on Spotify or Substack, if you want to read it on Substack, you can do so for absolutely nothing. We also do a show on Thursday, which is our news analysis show. That's also completely free. And if you want to make sure you don't miss any of those, you can sign up for free at thegamebusiness.com. Now we do have one additional show that we put out on a Monday.

1:00It's called Here's the Drink and that one is for paid subscribers of the game business. Now paid subscribers of the game business obviously support everything that we do. If it wasn't for them we wouldn't even be able to do our free shows. If you're interested in becoming a paid subscriber if you happen to like what we do at the game business you can subscribe to it via our website. Just go to thegamebusiness.com. There's more details there. Anyway on to today's show and I have one last interview that I've been hanging on to from Gamescom. It was actually one of the most surprising ones that I did.

1:30It was with Commodore and specifically its CEO Christian Simpson who is better known as Perifractic. Now what I expected to be a sort of classic retro interview about resurrecting an old video game brand turned out to be something far more ambitious. Now Commodore has yes created some classic hardware for people to play on in the form of the Commodore 64 Ultimate, but it's also now publishing video games. There were new games for the Commodore 64 Ultimate, but also releasing some games on classic platforms such as its partnership on the Alien Breed game with Team 17. They're starting to compete with companies like Atari.

2:04It's also partnered, surprisingly, with CD Projekt for a cyberpunk version of the Commodore, which they've called the Commodore 77. They showcase that at Gamescom. Now, on top of that, it has released a flip phone, the Callback 8020, which is a digital minimalist device in that it has plenty of apps and connectivity you can still use google maps to help yourself get around whatever city you're in but it doesn't include things like social media it's a strict back phone to those for those that don't want to be connected 24 7 and that in particular has proven to be a hit to the point that commodore is talking about itself in comparison to companies like apple now this is a short interview we did it on the booth uh commodore's booth at gamescom but i felt it was a surprising one and when you think around some of the conversations we've been having on this show regarding nostalgia and how that seems to be infiltrating younger audiences that didn't actually grow up with a lot of this stuff i think commodore is really leaning into this trend just as blizzard is right now with water walk forever just as you know runescape seen success with old school runescape what if we go back in time and take things in a slightly different direction that's what a lot of people are thinking at the moment anyway i thought there's a really interesting chat it's not too long i think you'll find it interesting so here is my conversation with perry slash christian Hello Perry, welcome to the show.

3:17Thank you, welcome. I was trying to look up your background. You have quite a unique, well, literal background. You have quite a unique journey into this role at Commodore. Can you tell us a little bit about what your experience is and what you've done before? Well, I was born at an early age. So, I was an actor, I guess, originally. So, I came out of college, did drama in college, and very lucky my first film part was Baptism of Fire on The Phantom Menace Star Wars Episode 1. Wow. Literally running across a hangar being shot at and squibs exploding off the hat and stuff. So I did that for, I still do that to a degree for about 20 years.

3:58I've been very lucky the films I got to work on. I still do voice acting. Yeah. But alongside that I started doing YouTube. just on a on a whim i thought well i love retro like i'm into yeah i had commodore 64 and amstrad pcw i was building up my old collection so i thought i'm just gonna do a repair video for a commodore 64 yeah and someone said i always remember i read in a forum they said this is amazing please keep doing this i said i didn't understand why or what it might be but you know i try i try and make jokes and videos and stuff so i kept doing it and eight years later i got to review something called the c64x which is yeah a pc like a linux pc that was licensed from the still existing commodore brand yeah so it was the commodore 64x the video got a million views that put us on the radar of the license or the the brand owners oh wow and we started talking you know myself sean uh donahue and leo leo nigro who kind of created that product and licensed it we started saying, you know, I wonder if we could maybe do something with the real Commodore.

5:09Maybe license it. We put a proposal together with three options for them. It was like, you know, we could work together or we could license it. Or kind of almost half tongue-in-cheek at the end, like, you know, or we could maybe buy the brand. And I always remember we waited for a couple of weeks and they came back to me and they said, you know, they're Dutch. They said, you know, you seem to know Commodore better than we do. we might like to sell you the whole company and it was like wow what and uh from there we just we went full steam ahead got investments the beauty of it was just to sum that up we you know being in the retro community in commodore uh commodore youtube videos i knew what people wanted because i was one of those people yeah i'm the customer so to put together a commodore 64 or Ultimate, which you'll see inside the booth, you'll see it inside the booth, was very easy to put together, thanks to Gideon who'd already created the parts.

6:07And yeah, that's the, believe it or not, that's the short version. And how are you finding the baptism of suddenly being a company CEO? It's another baptism of fire, yeah. It's a privilege. I say to people all the time, I am just honored to be able to be in this position and to get to be a steward of the brand. so i just feel lucky constantly that it's a company that people already recognize you know i could be working on a startup that we have to sell from the ground floor up here it's people immediately understand what it is yeah very lucky we'll get on to the game stuff which is but i have to say i was really fascinated by the disconnect sort of trend that you've uh you've been tapping into with the phone i didn't even know much about it i had to read a little bit more into it and i find it really appealing how did the two things come together commodore and that that sort of idea it almost looks too obvious to me but i'm on the inside people want to go back to simpler tech they're getting sick of smartphones being you know their data being harvested and sold tracking everywhere tracking cookies which we don't have on our website for that reason people want to go back to that simpler tech commodore is from that time yeah and we left well i'd say the lights dimmed is how we say it um or we blipped out in 1994 right before the internet became a thing right before you know the iphone started to be a thing in 2003 so it's all it almost makes sense if you reboot commodore you start where you left off 99 now so now we're in 1995 to 2000 era for commodore which is perfect because that's what people want to go back to right so uh that's where the digital minimalism fits in perfectly with commodore yeah i can see the appeal myself can is there a groundswell of people that are sort of craving this oh yeah oh the the movement is huge towards this this you know digital minimalism more intentional tech yeah you've seen people buying you know vinyl records again uh going back to flip phones organically yeah and just getting off facebook and that is a huge movement so we again we're kind of lucky that it's happening with or without us.

8:21But my philosophy is we need to build Commodore into the same level as Google and Apple so we can do the cool retro things for the retro fans, for myself being a retro fan. How do we build Commodore to be that big based on nostalgia alone? That's a niche and you can't do it as a hobbyist computing brand. So my philosophy with the flip phone, for example, with other things you're going to be seeing from us is those bring in the bigger audience. Like our tie-in with Cyberpunk. It brings in that bigger audience so we can afford to do bigger things for the original fans. So it is a symbiotic win-win relationship.

9:01I was going to ask this at the end, that Cyberpunk partnership. I get it. It's a broader game, big, massive, mainstream mega hit. What's the connection between that and Commodore? So a very interesting one. So Cyberpunk, that timeline of their 2077 version of the future, it stems away from our real future in the early 80s right so uh if you some people say 82 84 is when the cyberpunk timeline diverges so we go back to commodore the commodore 64 in our story officially commodore survived continued on and in 2077 it's still a brand that people love so in their world you can still buy a 64 but it's now a 77 it's been upgraded a bit.

9:48But also retrofuturism is how you describe cyberpunk. Yeah. Right. Like Blade Runner is retrofuturistic. Our whole philosophy here is we do retro and we do future. Yeah. We do the two hand in hand. Yeah. So it just fits. Yeah. It's really fascinating. It's great. We've got Microprose there, Atari over there. Yeah. Yeah. Like the old days. Yeah. It is like the old days, but at the same time, you're doing stuff that is not just leaning. Because I was going to ask, like you know i bought myself an analog 64 recently i love these old these old products um and i was gonna ask if the nostalgia driven market for these sort of premium devices is large enough to sustain a business long term and i'm guessing the fact they're doing this other thing is maybe not well there's two answers to that it is big in the sense that all those parents even grandparents are now introducing their kids to it yeah so the nostalgia sort of permeates through two three generations we're seeing that now right i mean you look through the window there's a kid playing on a c64 right now who's next to him his dad right that's so that works really well for keeping nostalgia alive but it is still if you if you look at it as a segment it's still you know small hobbyist even with that so also we're not getting any any younger no right so you could argue that that eventually will dwindle but our goal with this is you attract Gen Z with maybe the Y2K aesthetics, those kids, instead of just like saying, oh yeah, dad, that's cool.

11:17Thanks, dad. And then going back to their iPhone. Yeah. They're now going to see this surrounding them and feel like, oh, I actually, this is a vibe I like. Yeah. And that way it becomes sustainable, right? Those kids grow up and they show their kids and we keep doing this. But the other side of it is, of course, it can dwindle away, which is why we always have to do modern products alongside it. Like a flip phone and like other things we'll be bringing out. How did the Commodore 64 launch, relaunch go? Phenomenal. I knew it would be big, but we've sold, okay, in our first week we sold, I mean, I talked about numbers a bit, so I can say this again.

11:59Like our first week of three weeks, we generated over 2 million in revenue. We are orders of magnitude more than that today. But C64s alone, we've sold over 27 ,000 of those machines, which is mind-blowing, right? For a 40-year-old computer. So that's been amazing. But what was really interesting was when we launched the phone, that did the same in its first weekend as the C64 did in its first three months. So the phone immediately went to the sky. amazing that's because when you look at those market segments as i was saying the retro the the commodore community specifically if you look at it as a segment of the phone market it's 0.0 point zero zero zero six three percent yeah of the phone market so you can see what we can tap into what the potential is to bring commodore to that much bigger world yeah i imagine lots of people that come in for the commodore 64 come in quite near the start and it might be that's where you'll get most of those fans where with the phone could potentially yeah if the momentum builds around that idea and that concept it can keep growing yeah exactly this might be a naive question but have you been heavily impacted by the component shortages we've been somewhat impacted yes so we we've been quite lucky that you know we made a decision early on to buy up a bunch of fpgas more than we needed okay and there was talk of using them in a separate product so we had them on standby then when the fpga prices more than doubled we were able to tap into our existing stock of 10 000 fpgas it does continue to impact us we see a lot of complaints about the phone price we found a way to drop it by a hundred dollars but even then you know understandably 399 for a flip phone although it's not a yeah it's not your granny's flip phone but it can seem expensive but That is purely because the RAM price went from$11 per unit to$86 per flip phone.

13:56Just for the memory. That's before you look at development, software licensing, everything else. So to release that phone for$400, we have a tiny sliver of a margin on that. But it's great for the company and for the awareness as well. So there are other financial benefits. No, it's not just a flip phone. It does do apps and things. it isn't completely disconnected. No social media. So social media is blocked because there is a huge growing market that want that. But it runs 99 % of Android apps. It has a 48 megapixel Sony camera and just some really cool stuff. You can remote control the C64U using it from the LED colors.

14:39As long as it's on the same Wi-Fi network, you can configure the RAM, you can save your game, you know, game configuration. Everything you can do in the menu of that, you can do from the phone. So we're building an iPhone-like ecosystem where the iPhone can control the Mac, the callback can control the C64. That's cool. That's very cool. Well, you know, you're expanding into software, right? With Alien Breed, the collection. What's the ambition here? Are you taking on Atari? I would say we're friends with Atari, right? It's like... Oh, yeah. It's not like the rivalry. Retro scenes are all very friendly with each other.

15:17That's why I think I'm always quite surprised by and pleased by. Yeah, but I think joining them, you know, a rising tide floats all boats, if you want to put it that way, so that everyone doing good stuff for the community and the market helps everyone. But our first publication was Jupiter Lander, which you see running on one of the machines. Jupiter Lander 2, I should say. Jupiter Fracture. And that was the first Commodore game out of the gate for us. and again as i say we go retro we go future yeah so retro was jupiter lander 2 future was alien breeds for pc and console yeah and we'll keep following that uh methodology because it it's working like it's working well yeah so you're playing to do quite a bit more in this space then yes we have some very interesting launches hopefully at ces in january oh uh from a software and hardware perspective but software is definitely part of the roadmap and uh yeah we've had a lot of fun doing alien breeds yeah yeah very good yeah um exciting it's awesome have you had to i know you've added a major nelson to the team you had to expand quite a lot to sort of do that um yes that that's been really interesting he was here yesterday a lovely guy uh we're very lucky to have him so expansion is is tricky right how do you do it without getting too big yeah i everything still passes across my desk every single decision because it's very i want to have one very clear vision.

16:39There's a reason like in Hollywood, you have one, talking about Hollywood at the start, you have one director on set. So the movie is one vision. So we're definitely being very cautious about expansion. We have about 30 team members now, 30, 30, which is almost feels too big for a startup. But when you look at the scale of what we're doing, I couldn't do it alone. So we have to have that. So we're very slowly bringing on team members and just being cautious with the cash flow and all of that. So the games that you're doing, how is that working? Are people pitching stuff to you? Are you going out looking for people to work on specific projects?

17:17Yeah, so Alien Breed was something that was pitched to us by Anstream and Team 17. And we're very lucky. They've done a lot of the legwork already. We were able to come in and help with the publishing side and the marketing. and obviously, you know, it's got our name front and center, which is amazing as well. But we receive pitches almost daily, I would say. Okay, great. So we just announced something called Made for You or Made for Ultimate, which is to develop games specifically for the C64 Ultimate that take advantage of the extra, you know, 24 channels of sound, the extra RAM and CPU speed.

17:52So if you go to the bottom of our website, there is something that says work with us or build with us. you can submit stuff. We have a very purpose-built form. I look at every single submission myself personally. Not every day because I don't have time, but I have a growing list, which I need to get back to after Gamescom. But that's how we will be able to work with people, co-brand, and help them publicize their games on our website. Amazing. Ask one final question, which is, I always ask this question at the end of my interviews, where would you like to be in five years? I'm still here, still doing interviews and just being in the booth.

18:31I think as far as... Physically here. Physically here. As far as Commodore goes, I do see it alongside Atari, you know, in a level kind of way, like the level they're doing, the turnover they're generating. They're a public company. I don't know if we'll become a public company. Yeah. But we get a lot of requests for that from the fan base. They want to own a piece of Commodore. Oh, right. And that would be one of a couple of ways we could literally allow you to have a share certificate for Commodore on your wall. So I think just still doing what we're doing sustainably. Maybe I originally said I want to do two things really well every year.

19:11We've done, I think, six or seven things. Every single one has been successful. We're very lucky. You know, knock on wood. yeah so i'd like to still do that not do too much and and just keep growing that in that way well i'm excited it's going back i think it's a really interesting approach particularly with the phone component too i know that's not necessarily games per se it's got commodore games on it so well i guess a little bit yeah maybe but yeah well congratulations on this lovely move it's really cool i'm gonna look around it in a moment and uh yeah congratulations on there getting up yeah thank you that's it for today's episode of the game business show thank you to perry slash Christian for talking to us today.

19:46I do find this phenomenon quite interesting, not just because there's obviously lots of older gamers that remember these days and they want to go back to how they felt when they were younger, but because there's actually lots of younger gamers too that sort of missed out on all this. And they're wondering, hey, what if our games were a little bit simpler? What if we can go back to those sort of moments? What if we could have a phone that doesn't connect me to the internet every 30 seconds? I don't know. I think it might be an interesting trend or maybe that's just the older man in me thinking.

20:12But that's it from us today. We will be back, of course, with more news analysis, insight and interviews in the days and weeks ahead. If you want to make sure you don't miss an episode, you can go to thegamebusiness.com, put in your email address and become a subscriber. You can, it's all for free. But if you'd like to receive our Monday episode called Here's the Dream, that is only for paid subscribers. If you're interested in becoming a paid subscriber, please do. It helps us fund everything that we do. But that's it for me today. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.