For the readers among us, below is a transcript of Peri’s video message. To be the first to know what’s next, sign up for our newsletter.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Commodore Corner. I am Peri Fractic, of course, president, CEO and Chief Joystick Waggler here at Commodore, and we are coming up on a year since the launch of the Commodore 64 Ultimate. All of the original pre-orders have long since shipped, and we’re improving the logistics daily with some real and tangible changes — but not just the original pre-orders have shipped.

We’re officially out of pre-order mode for some models, although they are selling out fast themselves, and we’re coming really close to the final Founders Edition of the original breadbin being sold out. So if you’ve had your eye on that golden goodness — well, it’s time to act now. We’ve manufactured over 30,000 new Commodore 64s and counting, with revenue that puts us in the top 0.01% of startups — making Commodore a bit of an extreme statistical outlier. We just launched on Best Buy as well, and we got a ten-out-of-ten review from many outlets, including that one from IGN, who called it a masterpiece. Which is… yeah. No words.

We’ve launched the slimline C64C pre-orders, of course, with the same great motherboard, sleek new case, all made from the original Commodore tooling, just like in 1986 — and also a masterpiece, we presume. And we’ve worked with the community towards a shared firmware update policy for all those machines. We’ve added over 10,000 officially endorsed titles to CommoServe. That’s our online library of games you can access through the machine. That’s right — there’s no backups or playground duplicates there, but you will find SID chip music, demos, games and other community tools, with more being added every week.

Plus, we just launched the open beta of our Commodore Licensing and Affiliate Pipeline, aka CLAP. So all the wonderful community projects from the last 40 years can apply to use the official Commodore logo, wordmark and website with their creations, and the larger community has a quick and easy way to discover them — subject to some very stringent checks, of course.

Now, this was all as I set out ten months ago, as the vision in the Let’s Buy Commodore series, and it is just so cool to see it coming to life in a very slow and steady manner. We just launched a new website, if you didn’t notice, with much improved order-tracking timeline that we continue to refine daily.

So yeah — it’s been a really good year, and I can’t thank you enough for joining this journey. A year ago there were a lot of questions, and I’m really proud of the answers the team has given. But there is still one question we hear more than any other. What’s next?

Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Okay, so you’re saying you want to know what’s next? Oh — okay. Of course you do. So do I, and I can’t wait to tell you. Now, the marketing team tells me I’m not allowed to say specifics quite yet. Even though I’m the boss. It might be time to fire some people. But here’s what I can say for now.

Firstly, there are many people who rightly say, as I did in those original videos, that Commodore can’t survive solely on nostalgia. Now, I’ve been building it on those two pillars I originally set out and called Retro and Future. We call it retro-futurism. I know we can’t please everyone, and when we do inevitably release something new or futuristic that isn’t a rebooted classic computer, those same people asking what we’re going to do next — and saying we can’t survive on nostalgia — will likely shout, that’s not a Commodore! But we have to be a little brave here if Commodore is to endure. I always said we would release retro products and future products in turn, and so we are now walking towards the future we were promised. One in which technology is a tool for the masses, not a trap set by the classes mining our data and stealing our attention.

So what does that look like in practice? Well, for one thing, Commodore always built products around people, not around capturing their attention. Moving forward, there are a few areas we’ll focus on.

The first: preservation.

That’s the retro. It’s why the Ultimate is 99.9% backwards compatible, and it’s why we ship with titles beyond just games — the SID and demo scenes deserve their due as well. It’s why we’re officially licensing community projects. It’s why we’re also a public benefit corporation — a PBC — to promote open and accessible technology development that empowers creators and innovators worldwide, and also preserves the legacy of early personal computing.

The second way is expansion.

The Commodore 64 is more than just a computer, after all. It’s a whole ecosystem, and soon we’ll have our own peripherals, accessories and software titles, all to be revealed. We want to help grow the active community around the Commodore 64 and the Ultimate, offering a way for original users to connect with their kids and grandkids, while providing a space for the Millennials and Gen Z chaps and chappesses looking for less from their tech.

And the third way is, well, it’s what Commodore always was to us: imagination.

This is actually where things get really interesting, and where the retro-futurism really connects. Everything we’ve done thus far has focused on callbacks to what Commodore has done in the past. But very soon — yes — we’ll be picking up where Commodore left off in the 90s, in a way that, as I alluded to, may make you flip out a little bit. But it’s important to underline: every era of technology needs companies willing to try a different approach. And all I can say is that philosophy is still firmly at the heart of Commodore.

Or is it? Yes, I hear you. What is it? Well — all I can say is, mark your calendar for June the 16th. Commodore answers.

Cheerio!