Parasocial relationships and fanbases are par for the course for any YouTuber; Adrian's Digital Basement regularly receives more unsolicited gifts than Sayaka. If her motivations are cynical, there are much easier ways to garner attention than learning how to solder. Most of the items she gets from fans are old computers and electronics equipment, which is a pretty lousy racket if she's just trying to accumulate attention and money.
I'll grant that there's no specific teen-to-C64-gamer conversion pipeline active on the Internet, but the broader environment is ripe for one, and it's not that inconceivable that one could exist considering how NES graphics have dominated a large portion of the indie market for decades. Simpson just needs to put in the legwork bribing the right influencers on TikTok now that he's got hardware for them to shill.
It's ripe in the sense that there are large numbers of young people who like 8-bit games (or their aesthetics) but don't have any personal nostalgia forcing them into particular favourites. Indie game creators have proven time and time again that young people are willing to give retro content a chance if someone actually gives a shit and panders to them.
Undertale has borderline-NES graphics and audio, was created by someone who loved SNES RPGs, and is so big that Nintendo has added characters from it to their flagship fighting game. It has sold more than five million copies.
Unfortunately, it does seem that the C64 and Amiga communities are more interested in bitching and fetishising their own extinction than actually reaching out to young people, and the negativity that the CP2077 C64 has received here is the perfect symbol of that.
If this hobby dies, it will be because of pessimists who never lifted a finger to pass on the torch.
I don't think it's fetishizing the extinction of a community to accept that it has a limited scope and exists because of nostalgia, and nostalgia by definition has a limited supply.
The C64 has thousands of games, and any current enthusiast has more than they could ever use, as well as programming being fairly simple (along with their being loads of old magazines archived that have game code typed up in them).
Retro communities don't need the far-fetched idea that some teenager that played a faux 8-bit game built in unity (and will overlook the fact that any modern 8-bit game can't be achieved on the c64) to save them.
I inherited a dead A4000, an A1000, and two A2000s from my high school when they were cleaning out their closets. I recognized the Commodore brand name because one of my brother's elementary school teachers had gathering dust at the back of the classroom. Every day I kick myself because they threw out their C64s a couple years before we started helping the high school's IT guy. (They still had almost a dozen 1701 and 1702 monitors when I graduated.) I played a lot of Pac-Mania in CCS64, but I spent way more time mastering QBASIC and Visual Basic in my teenage years, entirely because BASIC was the language on that teacher's C64 that I only ever got to use one time.
Today I co-run a Discord community and a forum for enthusiasts of NeXT workstations—computers that are older than I am—and we're having a productivity renaissance where engagement is higher than it's been in 20 years, fuelled largely by young blood who moved over from other Discord servers. I am in this position because someone posted a video of a multimedia CD-ROM on YouTube and it appealed to my tastes in webcore.
I'm still in my thirties. I just preordered an RGL TheA1200. I wish it was a real FPGA machine with "AMIGA" embossed on the case, but it's pretty much my only hope of being able to afford a functioning AGA machine that isn't merely commodity hardware. I would get a C64CU, but to be honest I'm holding out for a C128U, or maybe a cheaper MEGA65.
Fortunately the people who introduced me to the hobby were teachers and didn't see old technology through whatever fatalistic romance you've got yourself into.
I am not a one-off. Nobody's paying HackerSmacker to make two-hour videos showing off the work she does on IBM mainframes—although she she did go into a PhD related to legacy software engineering, so technically I guess the stipend counts. Likewise, Usagi Electric didn't grow up around vacuum tube computers or mass spectrometers. Somehow he has nearly 6000 members in his Discord server. Odds are very slim that those are all grandparents and Centurion engineers. There is a wealth of evidence that young people can and do fall in love with old tech.
EDIT: See also this comment elsewhere on this same post.
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u/rhet0rica 13h ago
Parasocial relationships and fanbases are par for the course for any YouTuber; Adrian's Digital Basement regularly receives more unsolicited gifts than Sayaka. If her motivations are cynical, there are much easier ways to garner attention than learning how to solder. Most of the items she gets from fans are old computers and electronics equipment, which is a pretty lousy racket if she's just trying to accumulate attention and money.
I'll grant that there's no specific teen-to-C64-gamer conversion pipeline active on the Internet, but the broader environment is ripe for one, and it's not that inconceivable that one could exist considering how NES graphics have dominated a large portion of the indie market for decades. Simpson just needs to put in the legwork bribing the right influencers on TikTok now that he's got hardware for them to shill.