What did Commodore sell at its peak?
Commodore Business Machines began as a typewriter repair company founded by Jack Tramiel in 1954 and ended up the largest home computer maker in the world. The Commodore PET arrived in 1977, the same year as the Apple II and the TRS-80. The VIC-20 followed in 1981 and became the first computer of any kind to pass one million units sold.
The Commodore 64 landed in August 1982 at $595. By the 1983 Christmas season, mail order dealers were shipping it for $229. Commodore could afford that because it owned its own chip maker, MOS Technology, acquired in 1976, and produced the SID sound chip and the VIC-II graphics chip in house while rivals bought parts at market rates.
Tramiel turned that cost advantage into a weapon. "We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes" was the line he repeated after the VIC-20 launched in 1981, and the Computer History Museum still quotes it in his profile. The price war of 1983 did exactly what he wanted. Texas Instruments quit the home computer market in October 1983, Mattel and Coleco abandoned their machines, and Atari's computer division bled cash. From 1983 to 1986 the Commodore 64 held roughly 30 to 40 percent of the United States home computer market.
Why did Jack Tramiel leave in January 1984?
Tramiel left Commodore in January 1984 after a long fight with Irving Gould, the chairman and majority shareholder who had bankrolled the company since the 1960s. Accounts differ on whether he resigned or was pushed out. The issues were control, Tramiel's wish to bring his sons into management, and his push for a 32-bit machine to replace the Commodore 64 before the Macintosh made it look dated.
He did not retire. In July 1984 his new company bought the consumer division of Atari from Warner Communications and renamed itself Atari Corporation. The one person who understood Commodore's pricing, its factories and its customers better than anyone else was now running the competition.
What he left behind was a company with enormous market share and nobody at the top who knew what to do with it. Gould was a financier who read balance sheets. Product direction was not his job, and by every account from the engineers who stayed, it was nobody else's either.
How did the Amiga fail to save the company?
Commodore bought Amiga Corporation in 1984, outbidding Tramiel's Atari, and shipped the Amiga 1000 in 1985. It was not a slightly better computer. It carried three custom co-processors, named Agnus, Denise and Paula, that handled graphics, sound and input independently of the CPU. It did preemptive multitasking in 1985, when the Mac could not and Windows was still a shell running on DOS. It had stereo sound as standard and a palette of 4,096 colors when most PCs managed 16.
NewTek's Video Toaster turned the Amiga into the cheapest broadcast video workstation available, and it produced effects for television series including Babylon 5 and SeaQuest DSV. Dedicated silicon drawing the picture while the main processor does something else is how every machine works now, roughly a decade before 3dfx brought the idea to the PC.
Writing in 1994, BYTE magazine called the machine "so far ahead of its time that almost nobody, including Commodore's marketing department, could fully articulate what it was all about". That last clause is the entire problem. Commodore sold the Amiga 500 as a games machine in one campaign and a business computer in the next, and convinced neither audience.
What did Mehdi Ali do to Commodore?
Mehdi Ali, a management consultant by background, joined Commodore in 1986 as an adviser and became president in 1989. Research budgets were cut. Marketing got worse. His pay went the other way: $1.38 million in 1989, and roughly $2 million in base salary by 1990, at a company a fraction of the size of IBM, whose chairman John Akers earned $713,000 in 1989.
The product decisions were worse than the pay. The Amiga 600 of 1992 was meant to be a cheaper Amiga 500 but arrived barely cheaper, with fewer expansion options and broken compatibility with existing peripherals. The Amiga 1200, which was genuinely good, could not be built fast enough to meet demand. Commodore was overproducing the machine nobody wanted and underproducing the one people did.
Then there was the CD32. Released in 1993, it was the first 32-bit CD-ROM games console and it sold respectably in Europe, where the brand still meant something. It never went on sale in the United States. Commodore lost a patent case to Cadtrak over the XOR patent, and a federal judge barred the company from importing products into the country. Finished consoles sat in the Philippines while the company ran out of money.
Is Commodore still in business in 2026?
Yes, though not as the company that went under. Commodore International filed for voluntary liquidation on April 29, 1994, three days after closing the Amiga division. The brand then passed through German PC maker Escom in 1995, Gateway in 1997, and a run of licensees who stuck the name on phones and set-top boxes without building anything that mattered.
In 2025 an investor group led by Christian Simpson, the retro YouTuber behind the Retro Recipes channel who posts as Peri Fractic, bought Commodore Corporation B.V. for what he has described as a low seven-figure sum, signing on July 31, 2025. The deal covered 47 original trademarks, the oldest dating to 1983. "Commodore has been asleep for over 30 years," Simpson told Time Extension in 2025.
This Commodore actually ships hardware. The Commodore 64 Ultimate, an FPGA recreation of the 1982 machine with HDMI, USB and Wi-Fi, went on sale on July 12, 2025 at $299.99 for the BASIC Beige model and passed 10,000 units sold within months. A slimline C64C Ultimate followed in 2026, molded in tooling recovered from 1986. The Amiga line went elsewhere: Amiga Corporation, formerly Cloanto, holds the Amiga trademarks and the AmigaOS 3.x rights after settling with Hyperion Entertainment.
What does an original Commodore 64 cost in 2026?
Enough Commodore 64s survive that this is a cheap hobby to start. A tested breadbin with cables and a working power supply usually runs about $100, and under $200 buys a good one with a disk drive. Untested units sell closer to $35, which is a gamble, because a dead SID chip alone costs around $50 to replace. Rare variants and sealed boxed sets climb past $1,000.
The usual failure point is the original power supply, which has a habit of cooking the machine on its way out. Budget for a modern replacement before plugging in a 40-year-old brick.
Where to find one today: working machines, boxed software, manuals and cartridges turn up constantly from small sellers on Etsy, at the prices above. If you would rather not maintain 1982 hardware at all, the Commodore 64 Ultimate does the same job for $299.99 and plugs into a modern television. Apple went to the edge as well and survived its 1997 near-bankruptcy because it got a product leader back. Commodore never did, which is why the recreations arrived 31 years after the liquidation instead of the machines themselves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns Commodore now?
Commodore is owned by Commodore Corporation B.V., bought in July 2025 by an investor group led by Christian Simpson, the YouTuber behind the Retro Recipes channel, for a reported low seven-figure sum. The purchase covered 47 original Commodore trademarks, the oldest from 1983. The Amiga trademarks are held separately by Amiga Corporation, formerly Cloanto.
How many Commodore 64s were sold?
Nobody agrees on a number. Commodore's own 1993 annual report claimed 17 million Commodore 64s sold, Jack Tramiel spoke of 22 to 30 million, and Guinness World Records now treats roughly 12.5 million as the credible modern estimate. Even at the low figure, the Commodore 64, sold from 1982 until the company collapsed in 1994, remains the best-selling single computer model ever made.
When did Commodore go bankrupt?
Commodore International closed its Amiga division on April 26, 1994 and filed for voluntary liquidation on April 29, 1994 in the Bahamas, where it was incorporated. The company was never rescued or restructured. Escom of Germany bought the Commodore brand and assets at auction in 1995, and went bankrupt itself the following year.