Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to where is that? So, 544! As always, my host, Justin Baker, and as always, I am joined by viable human, Chris Saturn. He sounded like you run out of breath when you're given the episode.
I feel like I'm running out of breath! Okay! A lot of it is I flail my arms, I'm still doing it. So vigorously that it kind of wears me out.
No, it's like, it's turned into this like, way up in the air karate chops. I see. I'm just really glad that we don't do it in person, I think is what I'm saying anymore. I don't think I can intro the show without doing it.
If we gave you little flags, could you like talk in semaphores or do it? It looks like that's what I'm trying to do, I think. Sometimes it's crab claws up in the air, mostly karate chops. So, yeah, anyway, welcome, welcome to the second show of the evening, no one can tell.
We're fresh as daisies, we're coming into this full steam and completely coherent. We got this. Nothing's weird, everything's fine. It's normal.
It's in my mantra for 2025, nothing's weird, everything's fine. It has not been working out, I had to medicate. It's totally fine. My way!
I've been playing the video games. I picked up Megabong, which is a, what are we calling them now? A survivors-like? I guess we're calling them.
I've also heard bullet heaven. I've heard bullet heaven. I've heard what the survivors are like. It is vampire survivors by way of being 3D person, so you have a camera stick and you move the camera around.
Yeah. And there's a Z-axis, there's a lot of jumping. You can increase your jump height, you get double jumps and stuff. It's not quite as addicting as vampire survivors, although what is, aside from hard drugs?
Yeah, it's beside everyone. But it does have a kind of vibe that I like. One of the first characters you unlock is a skeleton sunglasses on a skateboard, and every time you jump, you does a kickflip. So it has this goofy Saturday morning feeling vibe to it.
Nice. That I like. It's a little slower on the progression. Vampire survivors, especially early on, I feel like you'll play a few rounds and not get it, and then you'll have one good run.
And suddenly you're getting avalanches of unlocks. At least that's how it is now. Now there's so much content for it. This one feels definitely a little slower.
You'll play a few rounds in a row, and you maybe get an unlock or two, maybe, and then play a couple more rounds. But it's fun. It has boss characters, which is neat. And you can actually finish levels.
The whole point of the level is you're trying to find the boss portal, and then summon the boss, which you can do whenever you want, but you need to be powerful enough to do it. So there's a little bit of fun gameplay there of like, trying to assess your power level, and when you want to summon the boss or not. And then you can go through the portal, and it takes you straight into the next level. And it's different enough to bring something new to the table, not just the new perspective of being like 3D third person.
And I think it's like less than 10 bucks, I think. I don't remember how much I paid for it. But if you're a survivors fan, and you've burned yourself out on all the other survivors' likes, you're tired of halls of torment, you're done with whatever the dwarven mining one was, that was pretty good. You've unlocked everything of Empire's survivors.
I think it's a good next one. You know, if you're looking for another one. Yeah. And it runs good on Steam Deck, which is where I've been playing it.
So that's been fun. Still doing the battle field stuff. I think I've hit a point with it where it's just kind of a thing. Like I log in and I do my dailies, and then I log off sort of thing.
You know, kind of like late era MMO players, sort of vibe, you know, where I log in and I do my things. I'm still enjoying it. I am perpetually annoyed with little things they do. Like they just recently finally started fixing some of the problems I had with the game, like just actual bugs.
And then I log in the other day and they had added, I've been unlocking the battle pass thing. And what frustrates me is they lock weapons behind the battle pass. And I don't know if you know this about first person shooter games, but having different weapons available is very important. That sounds weird.
They all just guns, right? No. I mean, yes. I don't know how it's all about guns.
But no. So it's frustrating to me like the best short-range sniper rifle is locked behind the battle pass. Like I wouldn't care if the battle pass is just cosmetics and shit, but they're putting like gameplay pieces in it, which is frustrating. And then they're announcing new sections of the battle pass that you have to do specific different things to unlock on a limited time window.
And so I go and I do all of those and I'm like, I've either finally done, I'm almost done with a regular season one battle pass. I'm only, I've got everything unlocked and I'm kind of finding my groove. And then I log in yesterday and it's like complete your Red Bull challenges. And I was like, I'm sorry.
Red Bull? Yes, you heard me correct. In my $70 retail game, in my $70 retail game, there's a whole battle pass sponsored by Red Bull. Yay.
And I have Red Bull specific challenges to complete, which of course I'm doing them. Because one of the things you can unlock is a little Red Bull can that dangles off your machine gun, which is just the stupidest fucking thing. Yeah. But it's just like, can we stop?
Stop, stop doing it. And they just added a new mode a week or two ago and now they're taking it away and they're like, it's gone now. And I'm like, why would you? What?
Quit taking modes away. This is the thing Andrew tells me about this because he plays the online shooters and he had me playing, what's the Blizzard one Overwatch? Overwatch. Yeah, he was kind of an Overwatch for a couple weeks and I was like, I'll try it.
Sure. It was like free or cheap. I don't remember. And we played it and I was like, I hate this.
I don't like this. I'm running around doing stuff, but I don't like these modes and they'd introduce a mode I liked. And I was like, oh, this is fun. I could see myself really playing this a lot.
And then a week later, I was like, where's the mode? And he goes, yeah, they take it out. It cycles through. It's seasonal.
And apparently like all of them do that now. I'm like, why would you spend developer money and time? Make people take time away from their families late nights, weekends to make content for a game that you're going to put in it for two weeks and then take the fuck away. Why are you doing this?
I don't know what you're doing. It's called FOMO, right? But shit, man. Yeah.
I'm like, I'm going to shoot some dudes and have fun. And no one really plays the objective in those modes because we're all there just to goof off and unlock challenges. Like this isn't a serious mode. It's not range.
You barely even get experience for it, right? And we were playing it one time. This guy was just yelling at us in the chat. And Andrew was like, this guy is so mad that we're not pushing the objective.
We're not playing the objective. And I was like, I'm just here to kill bots. Like I just need to get 10 headshots with this gun to unlock my such and such thing. Nobody gives a shit in this mode.
And he was so mad that he spent the rest of the match standing behind us throwing smoke grenades on us. I'm like, why? Do you have nothing better to do with your time? Clearly not.
And I could tell he was mad because I needed what the guy didn't know what this was. It was called a smoke assist. And it's when you throw a smoke grenade and then your friend, the person on your team, shoots someone from within your smoke cloud and kills them and calls it a smoke assist. And so I just spent a whole session doing nothing but throwing smoke grenades on my teammates, which they did not like because they couldn't see anything.
But I didn't care because I didn't smoke assist. And then every time I died, my own team started teabagging me. So I think they got mad about me. Another mat I've been, it's not video gaming, but I've been learning and exploring first edition advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
It was a very advanced. It is. It really is. The version of D&D I've been playing for the last several years is basic.
Simplified Dungeons and Dragons. It is called basic. It's the version of basic D&D from like the 80s. It's Dungeons and Dragons fourth edition for simple idiots.
And so I'm going from basic to advanced and it really has advanced. But I've been spending a lot of time just kind of digging into it. I never really bothered with first edition because it always seems too complicated and antiquated. And for whatever reason, I've that's been my hyper fixation lately is is it's the only addition of D&D that I just don't fucking get because it's so weird and complicated.
And I'm like annoyed that there's this one version of it that I just don't understand. Right. And so I've been going very deep on trying to put myself in the mental headspace of 1970s Midwestern war gamers to try to understand the design philosophy behind first edition 80 and D because it's just so different from how I played the game and always played the game. But it's been fun in its own way, you know, a kind of a, you know, a little research journey.
I have been inflicting 80 and D for edition on my regular weekly group. And they're finding it about as nonsensical as I have been. But it's been it's been an experience. I'll say that.
You've been experiencing it together. Anyway, what are you playing? So it's that time of year when everybody was putting out their best of the year lists and everything. So I was looking for some best of the year lists that weren't just silk song and clear of screlisted multiple times in different font sizes.
Right. And so I was trying to find some games that maybe were games that I hadn't heard ever hadn't played. And I found a couple that were worth trying out. I found Zexion.
And it's a Zexion set. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Zexion.
No, wait, wait. That was 40 years ago. It's called Zexion. And it's basically NES Metroid with bosses that are kind of Mega Man-like and moment to moment gameplay that has some Gunstar Heroes vibes to it.
Yeah. I was looking at it when you, because you just showed up in the modern chat, like, anyone played Zexion and I was like, what the fuck is that? I don't know. I have not.
So now I'm about six hours into it. And it's really good. It definitely, it won. It has that same like claustrophobic exploration vibe that earlier Metroid games have.
Yeah, it definitely looks really, really well. It's more goofy than it is creepy. It looks creepy in NES terms. Yeah, it looks like creepy by way of like NES wizards and warriors.
Yeah, yeah. That'll give it. And so far, I'm really pleased with it. The one complaint that I had was that you could only see, when you look at your map, you can only see a little bit of area around yourself.
But then I found a power up somewhere that gave me the ability to see all of the map. So it's an intentional design choice, it seems. But but also it has a ton of accessibility options, including the ability to turn on save states. You can also turn on a fractional damage.
So if you want enemies to do full damage or 90% damage or 75% damage or 50% damage or 10% damage or 0% damage, just a ton of really good accessibility options. Plus I have to give it credit because visually it looks the most like in any game of any of these faux NES games that I've seen. Like it seems to do the color depth and the pixel sizing and all that stuff is as accurate as I've seen from one of these games. It's clearly not in any games because any games wouldn't be able to store this much on one screen at one time.
Right. But it gives the aesthetic very accurately. I'm very, very pleased with that. So it is a Metroid style game.
So I'm not even going to say it's a Metroidvania because it leans much more into the Metroid than the Vania. Yeah. It's very much just a Metroid clone in that regard. I'm really digging on it.
And the different weapons are really neat. So yeah, it's good. It's worth checking out if you're into that. The other game that I tried out, which is not so much a me game, but I think it is a you game is called Absalom.
And it's designed by some of the guys that did Street Street 4 and Street Safari. But it's kind of like Capcom's D&D arcade games mixed with Slay the Spire. Oh, man. Yeah.
You were saying that right as I was looking at the trailer for it. Yeah. This does look like a me game. Yeah.
This looks like a very me game. I only did the demo on that one. I didn't buy that one yet. And I guess I was playing the demo.
I was like, I'm not sure how much I'm digging on this brawler combat, but this feels like something that Justin would really want. I like this art style too. This is our style. It's gorgeous.
It looks kind of like a, what's that one? A rogue, like thing where people go crazy and it's all black and red and a darkest dungeon? It looks kind of dark as Dunjini, but like colorful. Yeah.
Kind of. I was getting similar vibes to what I got from Streets of Rage 4 as far as gameplay. But then overwhelmingly positive on Steam. Every brawler feels the same to me.
So don't take me. How dare you. So in some of them, you walk left and punch. I don't know about that.
I'd even I'd even walked up and punched. And also, I don't know if it's just me, but I get some mild Golden Axe vibes from it. Okay. It's somewhere in the middle of Golden Axe and Capcom D&D brawler, but with gameplay that feels more like Streets of Rage 4 mixed with some slay the Spire.
Yeah. This looks real good. So I don't know if I'm going to stick with it, but I still want to bring attention to it because I think you and people like you need to know more about it because I've not heard anyone talking about it. Yeah.
Yeah. This is a lot of reviews, overwhelming and positive. And .enus listed on developer and publisher. And so it's kind of shocking to me that I've not heard of this either.
It's completely unknown to me. So similar to games, you played Streets of Rage 4, Turtles, Shredos, Revenge. Like, wait, recommend me shit, Steam. It would give me Hintai games.
Recommend some good shit. Stop clicking on the Hintai games, Justin. Well, I want to look at them because they're funny. I have that turned off on my steam.
It does not recommend. I eventually did because my recommendations were so fun because I would sit there and read them with Andrew after talking wizards because they were fucking funny. I'd be like, look at this one. No, look at this one.
So Steam just sees me opening them one after the other and then sharing some links. So I eventually had to turn them off and I miss laughing at them. But it's actually on his good. And absolutely looks like it probably is good.
It's not for me. Not sure about it. Yeah. Let's do some news.
First up, a lost chapter of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill was being released as a chapter in Fortnite. It's the weirdest news. And they even brought Uma Thorough back, I think. This is as disappointing as hearing that there's new Yakuza content in Roblox.
The more I hear about Fortnite and Roblox, the more it makes me feel like the old people I mocked when they didn't understand video games when I was a kid. It's literally exactly that. But like, man, can you just... The idea that Tarantino would fucking sign off on this to begin with, like he's always kind of been an asshole, but he's always kind of been an asshole that had some sort of weird, like, high art principles of some sort.
He always seemed to kind of regard cinema in this very sacred way, in the idea that he's releasing new Kill Bill content as fucking Fortnite exclusive. Maybe he's just a big Fortnite fan. I highly doubt that. He never know.
Maybe he just spends all day playing Fortnite these days. I think more realistically is someone after him a huge fucking sack of cash and he didn't have to do anything. But the interviews with him seems like he's very involved in it. Why?
I don't know. It seems like he was passionate about it, too. I would love if his second act going from like a, you know, cinema is my muse turns into all about that Fortnite content. This is high art.
The high art of Fortnite content. I don't know, man. I don't get it. What the fuck are you doing, Tarantino?
Yeah. Yakuza Zero is being delisted on all platforms on December 8th. Did you only put the sad news in here? Is that what this is?
This is just all the news. The Windows Store versions of Yakuza Kawami and Kawami 2 are also being delisted at the same time. It is under unknown if other versions of Kawami 1 and 2 will follow. I've heard some fan outcry of the fact that these new versions, specifically the Kawami 1 2 new versions, don't really provide like a new game price tag worth of content.
Yeah, they're just the same. Yeah. After they delisted these old ones, that'll be the only price tag you can get Kawami at, which is really frustrating. Well, they haven't said yet if they're going to delisted on Steam or GOG.
True. And I don't even know if the new versions are coming out on PC. I think it's just console for these new ports of Kawami 1 and 2. Zero, however, is getting its directors cut on every platform.
And that will be the only version available for sale. And it's going to sell for I think 50 or 60 bucks. And a lot of people don't like the new content and zero directors cut. They prefer the original version.
So that is an unfortunate misstep there for people who do own the original. They are going to allow an upgrade to directors cut for only $15. $15. Damn.
It's kind of frustrating. I think part of it is that, and I know that this is just kind of a me thing, but the Yakuza games have always been kind of budget kings for me. Like I know they release at full price, but they tend to go on sale fast and often. Like I got pirate Yakuza for I've been open.
It's still in the string. It was like $15 the other day. And I was like fuck, I buy $15. You know, you can get zero through six in a bundle for like 90 bucks year round on PS4.
And it really goes on sale for less than 50 bucks for zero through six. Yeah. And so it's like these have always been more content for dollar budget kings for me. People are like, Hey, I want some good wacky games that aren't your standard triple A bullshit and they're fun and weird and they're cheap.
And it's like Yakuza is an easy recommend. And so it's kind of frustrating to see this. What feels like kind of gree behavior. Yeah.
Like I get there, make a new content. You should be paid for your new content, but you don't have to deal with old versions like this frustrating. Now the original developer of Yakuza left Sega a year or two ago, and I feel like since then it's been a little questionable on a lot of the series decisions. Yeah.
Yeah. Tim Sweeney, God damn it, Saturn. Why? Where did you get this news?
The dumpster? Yeah. From the crash store. Tim Sweeney says that AI will be used in the making of every game.
So it makes no sense that steam would require developers to disclose its inclusion. Look, Justin, sugar is used in the production of everything. We don't need nutrition facts on the side. Hey, this is the I know that it's I don't need to tell anyone that Tim Sweeney makes stupid fucking arguments.
He does it professionally. Yeah. But this is the stupidest fucking argument. I'm so glad I've not made an epic account.
Fuck this guy. Who cares if you disclose it, Tim? Fuck off. Yeah.
Off. Um, new Taito and Turrican cards coming to Evercade. That's good, new see. Well, I think Turrican is still difficult to get Evercade stuff in the States.
Tariff, so that's not fine. Oh, here's the good news. Following the GZ Doom drama, the first official release of Forky Uzi Doom has been made available. Yeah, that's exciting.
It's a good one. Yeah. It's got good support for Windows and Linux and, you know, all the different platforms. It's good.
You can play it and you can play your old wads. I was on some, some form Reddit, I don't know. And someone was posting about, they had responded to this Uzi Doom news and they said, does anyone even play Doom except for speed runners? And my first thought was there are Doom speed runners.
And of course my next thought was, of course, there are those speed runners for everything. But then my next thought was like, am I weird that I still play Doom? Just like nostalgic to open up Doom and just go down. There's plenty of people who still play.
I mean, they just re-released them on all the modern consoles. No, no, no, they're fun. They're fun. They're fun.
Right. Very weird thing to say. It has been found for Street Fighter II hyperfighting. That's neat.
Cool. Yeah, neat thing. I don't remember what it did anymore. I'd read the article, but that was weeks ago.
Yeah. Raspberry Pi is raising prices due to RAM costs. Yeah, everybody is. I've heard a pet theory, conspiracy theory, that the costs of memory aren't actually going up as much as companies are saying they are.
And this is all just a drive to push us from owning our own computers to using AI platforms for everything. I wouldn't be terribly surprised. And if I found out there was market manipulation going on to achieve exactly that, I would not be shocked because so many companies are so whole hog in on the AI thing that if it bursts, they're fucked. And also they're pretty horny for the idea of us all just having cloud computing because then we don't have to have access to download anything.
Right. And we rent literally everything. Everything. Yeah.
Rental Accommodity. Economy. It's not a comedy. It's the opposite.
This is why I'm not on television. This is why I'm not on television. Among the many reasons. Valve confirms they've been funding FEX, the X86 to ARM translation layer and are also testing another translation layer called Lepton, which is Android to Linux translation via Wai Droid.
They've also had to come out a hundred times and say they are not making a phone because they are not making a phone. And my thought is why does everyone have to make fucking phones to be exciting in the tech news? Yeah. A lot of devices that are not phones guys, including laptops and tablets and phones as for pies and their upcoming headset.
There's a lot of things that are ARM based switches. The switches are based, yeah. I'm my problems with Valve, but I like where their heads at right now. I like where their heads have been at for the last few years.
I think part of that is because they're not fucking public. Right. And they're also not fucking their customers to make an extra penny. Yeah.
Valve is one of the last few companies that I really worry about. That's going to happen to gaming. Yeah. Valve and CD Projekt are the two that I'm like, man, if either one of them, you know, I don't want to go off on a tangent, but I have to go off on a tangent.
I meant to say this during the pre-show, but it completely left my mind. And I know you specifically hate this, but I had the weirdest fucking dream the other night that me and Andrew were playing Mario Kart with Shrek. And somehow Shrek's kid went missing. And so he looked in Shrek's kid's bedroom that was in my apartment for some reason.
He wasn't there. So we had to go to a mall and Mesquite to find his kid. The mall wasn't open yet. So we had to go to the security booth and the security booth was run by Gabe Newell.
And he kept trying to order us spicy chicken nuggets from Wendy's. And he kept calling them spicy windies chicken nuggets. And I kept insisting that it is windies spicy chicken nuggets, not spicy windies chicken nuggets. That's not how adjectives work.
And it was just the weirdest fucking dream I've had in years. So you have to stop taking LSD. I think this is your sign. Something was very wrong that day.
And I just woke up and I was like, what the fuck was Gabe Newell and Shrek in my dream? What is going on with my life right now? God damn it. Anyway, sorry.
There. The fuck was I? Post-release testing shows the analog 3D has timing and accuracies versus real and 64 hardware as much as 15%, which is pretty big timing and accuracies for a console that claims to be the all in all in 64. I don't know, Justin.
I have been told by several YouTube reviewers that the analog 64 is the greatest hardware that's come out in years. Did you know it plays in 64 cartridges? And those are basically the best games. Oh my God.
I can play blast core and body harvest and Jet Force Gemini and Glover and stop me when I name a good game. And just keep saying, go over and over again. You know what they're saying? For Buck Rumble, vigilante, wrestling, Zelda, Zelda, there it is.
There it is. Per a post on their Discord, old Unreal, the project, says they've reached an agreement with Epic to redistribute Unreal Tournament 2004 for free alongside a suite of upgrades that allow the game and its server client to run more fluently on modern operating systems and hardware, which is fantastic. I will say I've not had any issues running the UTO4 or the server at all, but clearly someone is if they're trying to figure this shit out. It's still a 32-bit application.
And that's true. 32-bit Windows is no longer available. 32-bit Linux is basically no longer available. It's being discontinued by almost every distro.
And those 32-bit libraries are getting clunkier and more annoying on a lot of machines. The Mac OS version doesn't play on modern Mac OS battle. So even if it mostly plays fine on most machines, having a more modern native version is still great news. Right.
It's great to see it preserved and it's a great game and we should spin up our virtual warrior server. Right. Because then we can play some bombing run and nothing else. As I insist, we only play bombing run.
And finally, Konami and Numskull have collaborated on a series of Metal Gear Solid Triangle themed toiletries including soap, shampoo, and body lotion. Finally, you can smell like Snake without having to buy that Snake perfume they've made a little while back. I guess. Why does Konami want us to smell like Solid Snake, Justin?
I don't fucking know. I don't know. I'm imagining me on the cash and being like, sweetie, can you pass me the Metal Gear Solid Triangle Solid Snake Body lotion? My elbows are dry.
My elbows are dry and I don't know when I'll need to do some CQC. Sure, honey. What smells like swamp runoff? Oh, you.
Oh, crap, battle. I fucking guess, man. All right. Whatever.
I don't know who it can only keep thinking. Not enough people smell like Snake yet. Well once you're done shredding on your Castle of Pena's skateboard and you got your skateboard stank all over you, you want to rub, you know, you got to clean up with some Metal Gear Solid soap and shampoo. Maybe you can get some lotion that makes you smell like the end.
Which brings us to our top of your hand. Not going to guess what that smells like first? No, it's just Commodore. Yeah.
I'm keeping up with the Commodore. It's not keeping up with you, Justin, it's dead. Oh, no. Synopsis, a computer company so important that they named a naval rank after it.
That's very kind of them, really. You know, it's so nice. Yeah. Some quick info about Commodore founded in 1958 or 1976, depending on which tax documents you believe I assume we'll get into that.
Yeah. Foundows Rejects, Emil and Irving Gould created in Toronto Head Office in the Bahamas, actual headquarters in Westchester, Pennsylvania, definitely. Totally above board. Yeah, everything's fine.
You will know them for the PET, the VIC-20, the C64, the Amiga, and the, you probably won't know them for the C64 GS and the Amiga CD32. That was the video game consoles, Justin. That way we're still on topic. Right.
I, for the first encounters, I think we had some C64s at my elementary school. I have vague memories of a computer that looked sort of like one that we would be upset to be stuck on because our computer lab was like split half the computer's renewer windows machines with Netscape Navigator. The other half were like the old computers, right? And I don't remember them well enough, but I think that they might have been C64s or Apple 2s.
Probably Apple 2. I feel like that would have been more useful by then. The Apple 2 I feel is such a, I feel like it might not have been. They were weird and not Apple 2e.
I know that. Because in middle school and high school, we had teachers with Apple 2s still. And I feel like I would have been, I would remember it and be like, oh, there's the things in elementary school, but I do not. Our weird old computers when I was on school were TI computers.
Oh my God. And then our new computers were Tandy's running DOS. Oh, thank goodness, Tandy. And then when I was in middle school, we got some Windows 3 machines.
I think they're HPs and then in high school, we had some Windows 95 machines. I do remember one of the games on the old computers and maybe someone will remember this game. It was a hide and seek game and it was like shitty 8-bit, vectory looking graphics. And it would be, it'd show up an image of like a playground and there'd be this little elf character sticking out very obviously from behind like a slide or some shit.
And you'd have to like move the cursor with the keyboard over to it and click on it. And it would be like, you found me and then it would switch to the next slide. So it was like, where's Waldo if all the other people weren't there? Yeah, it's like where's Waldo if you were trying to find Waldo in an empty room with one lamp in it.
Yeah. Hey, Waldo, you buy behind the lamp? Oh, I got caught me. I don't know why.
You did your Waldo voice in my first thought was, oh, that's what Waldo sounds like? No, he's just doing a fucking needle note fucking Waldo sounds like. I mean, that's exactly what he was talking about. Nobody can even find him.
I don't know what he sounds like. My cool was a programmer for Commodore software back in the day for VIC-20 NC64 software. And so he with one of his bonuses from work bought Commodore's Commodore 64s for his parents and for all the siblings sometime in the mid 80s, mid to late 80s. And he gave us a bunch of copied floppy disks of games because him and everybody in his office would trade floppy disks and they would because they had the programmer software that could copy them properly instead of the home consumer software where you had to finagle and daisy chain disk drives in order to copy them and everything.
But did he read that letter from Bill Gates about how copying floppy is piracy and bad? This was before Bill Gates cared because Bill Gates didn't have the monopoly on the market that he had later. And he was probably at home copying copies. Copying floppies.
Commer floppies. But the funny part was that our my uncle was able to get us the systems and all these stacks of floppies for cheap. But for anybody who didn't own a Commodore 64, it does not have a floppy drive. You have to buy that separately.
And he couldn't get that cheap. So we had to buy our own floppy drive. I remember my dad bringing me with him to Sam's Club. This is like one of my earliest core memories is going to Sam's Club with my father to get a Commodore disk drive and him bitching about it the whole time.
He's like, oh, your mother's brother, Robert, gave us his damn computer and doesn't even have the damn disk drive. I don't know what it looks like. I was going to electronics at Sam's Club and be like, you got that disk drive for the Commodore? They're like, oh, you want this one?
I'm just sitting here reeling at the idea of someone who's just a programmer being able to afford buying multiple computers with a bonus check for their family. Yeah. As just like a fun gift thing compared to now where programmers are like, no, I sleep in a closet. But my bar is going to go to a coupon to Chick-fil-A.
My rent's going up, so I'm going to have to sublet it to some stray dogs. Yeah. Commodore software was lucrative for like a year. Yeah.
I mentioned. So take us into Commodore. Yeah. So we started in 1958 with a Polish American typewriter salesman Jack Tramiel.
I'm not going to try to pronounce his real name because he chose not to go by his real name because Americans couldn't pronounce it. I see. So we will skip that entirely because I am also a dumb American. Yes.
Excellent. And he founded Commodore Portable typewriter was the original name of the company. He founded it in Toronto where they sold imported checklists of lock-in typewriters. There is more typewriters also known as dumb computers.
Right. Yeah. These are dumb computers with built-in printers. Wonderful.
But now I'm not going to go into more of his typewriter history. There is some. It's very confusing and it sounds very shady the more you read into it. That's just business back then.
You know, I mean, he feels like he was ahead of the curve as far as shading as sometimes. The more you read into him. So there were some early financial struggles, but the business said, well enough to stay afloat. The public on the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1962.
By then he was going into the name Commodore business machines. And every article you read about this specifies Canada and parenthesis because he later dissolved this company and founded a new company called Commodore business machines in America. Probably to avoid some tax things. Anyway, you don't say this guy.
No way. So he did get some backing from a large Canadian financing company. I forgot to write down the name of the company, but it doesn't matter. And they continue to grow their business both in typewriters and calculators.
They were able to get some early calculators and adding machines manufactured in Japan while Japan was still the cheap place to manufacture things. And they were able to get a head start on the calculator business because at the time it was mostly HP and Texas Instruments making stuff here in North America and Commodore making stuff cheap in Japan. Mostly rebranding Casios. In 1965, that financing company was caught up in a big fraud scandal, which led to the collapse of that company and most of the companies they had invested in somehow Commodore managed to avoid it entirely.
And of all the companies they invested in Commodore was one of the few that on paper was up and up. So they did not go bankrupt at that point, but they were very close to it because suddenly they didn't have their financial backer. So they turned to a Canadian financier named Irving Gould for help and Gould fronted the money to cover Commodore's debts in exchange for a sizable stake in the company and the title chairman. Some debts continued to rack up, but Gould kept bailing them out and eventually Gould talked them into shuttering Commodore Canada and then founding a new company in the Bahamas called Commodore International with the new subsidiary Commodore America that would be the actual business.
This guy seems real reliable. Everyone in this story is very shady, Justin. All of this feels like guys with cigars in their mouth the entire time. Yeah, this feels like some madmen shit.
Yeah, it really feels like Looney Tunes businessmen the whole time. So early on, one of the microprocessor manufacturers that they were working with for the calculators was MOS technology or MOS technology. I don't know how people pronounced it at the time. I think they called it MOS technology.
If I remember right, it's been a long, long, long time since I've seen or heard any contemporaneous reports about it. Anyway, this guy Chuck Pettle at that company convinced Samuel that they should ditch the calculator business and get into this home computer thing that's getting started at this point in the middle eight seventies. Smart typewriters, as they were known. Yeah, smart writers.
Now Tom Hanks has cornered the market. That's what we're going to call them in the future. So this guy Chuck Pettle, he worked with Commodore to design the first computer, which was the pet 2001 in 1977, which I don't know if you've ever seen what the original Commodore pet looks like. I've not known.
So it was mostly made out of steel. Oh my God. And it reused a bunch of components from their calculator. So all the keys on the keyboard or old calculator.
Calculator keys. And it looks like God, I'm looking at this thing is very unpleasant to type on one of those things. But what it was was very cheap. And so they sold a shitload of them.
Yeah. You can set reader built right into the deck here. Yeah. I'm so.
Because it was so cheap over the next three years, Commodore share in the computer market grew very, very quickly. They're listed as one of the top three largest micro computer companies within three years. However, the pet itself started quickly losing market share because one is cheap, two is ugly and three is really weak compared to everything that Apple and IBM had on the market. Cheap ugly and shitty.
You can only pick all three. So Commodore share the market ended up falling to under five percent. And they were desperate to get back into the business. So they went back to Moss technology and made a new chip.
And then they came out with the Vic 20. The Vic 20 was a bigger success. At first release in Japan in 1980 before releasing internationally in 1981, it was the first home computer to sell one million units according to Commodore. I found out other sources that said this and no one else.
I found out other sources that said it, but I found a lot of sources, historical sources that are all like, if you look back, the first computer ever sell a million units was the Vic 20 according Commodore. Jacks from your promises that it's true. So it's certainly a worthwhile promise. What happened to the previous 19, 19 VIX?
Was there just not? So it's called the Vic 20 because it had a combined 20 kilobytes of ram and ram. Its father is the Victor 20. Yeah.
That's a different company. Victor is a different company. I'm working on my two minutes of 1980s home computer based stand up. So the Vic 20 eventually sold two and a half million units by the time it was discontinued.
Which for a computer in 1981 this is pretty much what it was. Sure. Yeah. That's big, you know, it's respectable.
That's also when Commodore began their strategy of drastically undercutting their competitors' prices and taking the loss on the hardware in hopes of making it up on accessory sales like tape drives, disc drives, printers, monitors, etc. Pretty standard business practices for a lot of video game consoles. Oh yeah. From here.
You'd end up with all kinds of fathers angrily going to Sam's club by a floppy disk drive. Right. Commodore also aggressively marketed the device to schools and libraries at a price under $100. They often had a buy to get one free promotion on their computers.
The Chromebook model. Yeah, basically. They were the Chromebook scene before Chromebook. Just dirt cheap computers there selling to schools and libraries.
And it is a dirt cheap computer. Vic 20 is rough. It has incredibly low resolution, but it technically functioned and it came with a big ass basic programming book such as teacher self basic. Perfect.
Make your own software if you're so fucking smart. That's basically what it was. Mostly Commodore magazine at the time. Like half of the magazine was all just code like a type of basic new type of thing.
I'm looking at it now. It looks like to my untrained eyes. If I squint just looks like a Commodore to me. Yeah, just looks like a C64.
It looks the same. They're they're very similar design wise. They're virtually like just looking at the machine. Looked the same.
The the on screen appearance you can tell the difference because it was much closer to Atari graphics than it was to eight bit graphics. I guess the Atari is also a bit whatever. Anyway, I am probably 2600 games. I did learn that William Shatner did a Vic 20 commercial.
Did you do the Vic 20 commercial? Yes. And apparently in 2024 people were talking about it on X. Huh.
Everything at formerly known as Twitter. Yeah. And he defended the Vic 20 in 2024. He said my dear sport out of the Commodore Vic 20 was the best personal computer of the 1980s for the price.
The Atari 2600 was a game console from the 1970s. I don't remember what I can't see the original thing because Twitter is blocked on my entire home network at all levels at the routers. Yeah. Same.
I can't see what he's responding to. And even if you could pull it up it blocks everything until you create an account sign and all that shit. Anyway, I don't remember how much works on my network. So Vic 20 did pretty pretty thing.
Well, enough the Commodore had made a healthy amount of money. They invested it and immediately releasing a successor, which was the Commodore 64 came out in 82. It was more expensive than the Vic 20 or the pet, but it was still significantly cheaper than any other computer on the market that had 64 K of RAM, which was where the 64 comes from in the title. The initial price of the C64 in the US was $595 American dollars with no disk drive, no tape drive, no monitor, anything.
It was just computer you plugged it into your TV and you typed on it. Yeah. That is the equivalent to about $2,000 in 2025 money. I'm trying to think home computer.
If I went out and I built a high end computer. $2,000 is not a not an unheard of amount of money for like a high end personal computer in 2025 with no monitor with no disk drive. Yeah, that's true. Really the problem is $900 of these days is the graphics card.
Right. Yeah, that's true. So this wasn't seen as high end. This was seen as upper mid range really.
Yeah. So maybe kind of rough on the price, but I guess I'm saying it's not insane. No, no, it wasn't insane at all. And it was still compared to the two to three thousand that IBM was selling their computers for at the time.
It was considered a budget price. Yeah. However, the following year Commodore already dropped the price to $300. So half of what it launched at and they started to allow retailers to put the machine on sale for as low as $200.
So it was quickly dropping in price. And because it quickly dropped in price, it quickly became very popular. I'm sorry. Okay.
I had an idiot moment in my head where you had said it's $2,000 in 2025 money. And what I somehow was thinking was it costs $2,000 and then you're like, then they put it on sale for $200. I was like, there's no fucking way. No, it was 95 to 200.
Well, still it's a pretty massive market. Yeah, I dropped two thirds of its price within a year. That'd be like the switch went on sale a year after it came out for $100. Yeah.
So video games used to be like it. And I'm going to go buy, you know, I digress. I digress. So in addition to schools and libraries buying a C64, which of course they did because it was cheap and it was better than the big 20.
Commodore also aggressively started selling to governments. I was able to find notably the British government and NASA both started buying large contracts of C64 computers for stuff, which in 2025 thinking that 40 years ago, NASA was using comadors to go into space. Yeah. Fields like magic.
It does. I mean, fuck, a lot of that math was done with goddamn slide rules. Right. This is fucking magic.
But it feels like it would have been a downgrade to go from the slide rule to the Commodore something. But anyway, so yeah, by 1983, Commodore had reported over a billion dollars in sales, not adjusted for inflation, though their profit margin was under 10%. Yeah, because they were taking such a loss on these massive loss. Yeah.
They were still profiting. There was a profitable company, but they were profiting very little compared to their sales amount, especially compared to their competitors. Apple and IBM were making gobs of profit in comparison. The inflation calculator says a billion in 1983 money would be 3.25 billion today.
Yeah. So a ton of money. Yeah. Lots of cash coming in.
Oh, yeah. There was a Boston newspaper that was reporting on summer CES and 83 that claimed that Commodore was selling as much as the rest of the industry combined. Oh, shit. And software developers stated that as much as 65% of their sales came from Commodore customers, which some people buying two and three of these things.
Yeah. Well, they were saying that as far as their software goes, when they were selling a game or software on multiple different computers, more than half of them were buying the Commodore version compared to the other. So a big chunk of the market. And tech supporters also claimed that Commodore was the only PC hardware maker at the time that was making a net profit.
I couldn't verify that. But yeah, it's not impossible to say at that time. I'm sure plenty of them were operating on margins just to get their name out there. In 84, the board of directors was replaced after disagreements over lowering prices because Tramil just wanted to keep lowering the prices to get as many of them into homes as possible.