Commodore Gaming Opens North American HQ

Commodore Gaming, the personal computer brand resurrected from the 1980s as a specialized gaming PC, announced Tuesday that it has opened its North American headquarters in Stamford, Conn. Since re-establishing the brand in 2005 the company has been operating in Europe.

The news comes on the heels of the 25th anniversary of Commodore's introduction of the famed C-64 personal computer. In July, Commodore announced plans to return to the United States, launching with four different models.

The company also announced it has hired Bill Sims as Vice President of North American sales. Sims spent 17 years working at Electronic Arts as their regional sales manager for the Eastern Region. His focus at Commodore Gaming will be to get the new products onto big box retailers' shelves and into online game resellers' inventories.

In the 1980s Commodore went head-to-head with Apple, IBM and PC clone makers as it staked out a corner of the then-nascent consumer computing market. It introduced the VIC-20, the C-64 and the Amiga. The Amiga, especially, has left many fond memories in Mac users' hearts - the system featured the same microprocessor architecture as the Macintosh, but boasted color graphics and multitasking capabilities well before such features were standard on the Mac.

Reformed as a premium gaming PC manufacturer, Commodore Gaming has eschewed a custom operating system - the company produces Windows-compatible rigs especially customized for gaming, offering Core 2 Quad processors, Nvidia GeForce graphics cards arrayed using SLI, and custom case designs.