In a segment about emulation on “CNET Central” circa 1998, GameCenter.com editor John Marrin argued that the game industry was more concerned with the eventual emulation of current consoles than classic ones. That was prophetic, with Sony filing lawsuits in the first quarter of 1999 after the releases of Connectix Virtual Game Station and Bleem. Notably, these emulators could run current games at full speed and were also sold in stores. PSemu, an existing freeware PlayStation emulator, required a non-bundled copy of the system BIOS and wasn’t targeted.
Per a 2017 Eurogamer article, Connectix had approached Sony about collaborating on the VGS as a follow-up to Virtual PC, an Intel/x86 emulator for running Windows on PowerPC-based Macs, but was rebuffed. Connectix, instead, reverse-engineered the PlayStation BIOS to make a non-infringing emulator. Bleem’s much smaller development team had no idea what Connectix was doing, but the Eurogamer article and other sources aren’t clear on how they got around the BIOS past it being non-infringing.
Two weeks after Connectix won 1999’s MacWorld “Best in Show” award, Sony sued, arguing that, among other things, VGS circumvented the PlayStation’s copy protection and region lock. According to IGN at the time, this was false. Sony also sued Bleem several weeks later, with Eurogamer noting in 2017 that Sony’s lawsuit was a mildly altered replication of the complaint against Connectix. Confusion about the lawsuits abounded since Sony made no profit on consoles, with Eurogamer speculating in 2000 that it was in response to Bleem’s ability to run bootleg games.
