When I think PC gaming, two brands come to mind: Alienware and Commodore. Alienware, of course, represents the raw, unbridled face of contemporary gaming; a machine with enough graphical might to manage Crysis and Far Cry 2. Commodore, on the other hand, was the videogame posterboy in its day, a glorified game console that doubled as a education machine because it could push Oregon Trail.

The Commodore brand was a mainstay of my youth, the 8-bit C64 system in particular. Besides running “education software”, I spent many a day running Mario clones, programming my own low-end loops in BASIC, and waiting for the damn thing to boot games. It goes without saying, the Commodore is much beloved on this side.

So it was quite the revelation to learn that the Commodore name was back, and in a capacity that stretched far beyond an iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad app. Commodoreusa now has the license and is set on producing a line of keyboard computers, just like the Commodore of old. This time you can outfit it with quad-core processors, SSDs, a choice of Windows or Ubuntu Linux (you can also install Mac OS X), and other goodies. It’s a bit disappointing that a brand known for gaming doesn’t at the very least have a low-end ATI or Nvidia GPU (or beige color option!), but tis life. You should be able to play less graphically demanding 2D games like Dungeon Fighter Online with its Intel GPU.

There’s no pricing info yet, but the Commodore keyboard PC will be available for purchase this Spring. Psyched?