The Commodore 64 was rushed together by exhausted MOS Technology engineers over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays of 1981, crammed into an old VIC-20 case, and shown at CES in January 1982 with a $595 price tag that left Atari executives stunned. This episode explains how CEO Jack Tramiel’s demand for 64 kilobytes of RAM, at a time when the memory alone cost over $100 retail, was made possible by vertical integration: Commodore owned its own chip fab, so a machine that sold for $595 cost an estimated $135 to build.

From there we follow the price war that drove the C64 down to $199 by 1983, bled Texas Instruments out of the home computer market, sparked a hilarious $100 rebate loophole involving $10 Timex Sinclair machines, and helped trigger the North American video game crash. We break down the VIC-II graphics chip and Bob Yannes’s SID sound chip, the notorious 1541 disk drive that contained its own computer, and how cassette loading split European and American game design. Finally we cover the 1994 discontinuation and bankruptcy, the zombie-brand years, and the 2025 revival when YouTuber Christian Simpson of Retro Recipes and a group of investors bought Commodore Corporation BV and released the FPGA-based Commodore 64 Ultimate.

• How owning MOS Technology let Commodore undercut the Apple II by hundreds of dollars
• Jack Tramiel’s business-is-war philosophy and his revenge on Texas Instruments
• Why a 1 MHz CPU outperformed faster rivals thanks to hardware sprites and ADSR synthesis
• The 1541 drive parts shortage that killed the C64 while it was still selling
• The 2025 fan buyout, the Commodore 64 Ultimate and the cyberpunk Commodore 77 edition with CD Projekt Red