The origin of bleem!īleem! was a company based in Los Angeles that, in a similar fashion to Connectix, became notable for its release of a commercial PlayStation emulator, leading to a series of high-profile lawsuits involving Sony Computer Entertainment. Following the agreement he stated that Connectix "would gain access to technical resources at Sony that we've never had before new cash resources that will enable us to fund new projects." Despite this enthusiasm, McDonald's hopes would not come to fruition-SCE never went ahead with any plans, and Connectix eventually dissolved in August 2003.
Sony, realising they had no effective case against Connectix for copyright and trademark violation by this point, had simply bought them out.Ĭonnectix and Sony presented the agreement as a 'joint technology venture' to the press, and Connectix head Roy McDonald expressed excitement at the potential for future collaboration. These issues were due to be addressed in court by March 2001, but just before this could occur, Sony and Connectix came to an agreement and the VGS was folded into Sony Computer Entertainment. In addition, Sony also sued for patent violations, which imposed harsher rules regarding IP use than copyright laws. It started to seem like the company was increasingly in the clear the only two allegations left for Connectix to defend against were claims of unfair competition and trade secrets violation. On May 16, 2000, the San Francisco District Court also threw out seven of Sony's nine copyright and trademark claims against Connectix. In addition to reversing the injunction, the Court of Appeals also reversed the District Court's trademark ruling, which had claimed Connectix tarnished the PlayStation brand by releasing what Sony considered an inferior product. Sony was initially granted a preliminary injunction against Connectix by the Ninth District Court in April 1999 that prevented sale of the VGS due to its use of the PlayStation BIOS as part of the company's reverse engineering process.Ĭonnectix fought against this, and in February 2000, the Court of Appeals reversed the original ruling, lifting the injunction after deciding Connectix's use of Sony's BIOS was protected under fair use, a decision that lay significant groundwork for the protected status of emulation in the US legal system.
The VGS had barely released before incurring the wrath of Sony Computer Entertainment however, who sued Connectix for a number of perceived copyright and trademark infringements just three weeks after the MacWorld announcement. The VGS was publically announced - complete with endorsement from Steve Jobs - at the annual MacWorld expo in January 1999, and released shortly thereafter, receiving much industry attention. In 1998, Connectix had approached Sony to help design its follow-up product, a PlayStation emulator for Macintosh computers called the Virtual Game Station (VGS), but Sony declined, leading Connectix to reverse-engineer the PlayStation BIOS independently of Sony's involvement.
To understand the impact bleem! made, we have to turn back further to a company called Connectix, a large player in the Apple world in the 1990s that had achieved success with its Virtual PC product in 1997, a virtualiser designed to run Windows on Macintosh systems. But what if you could go into your local game store and purchase an emulator commercially that allowed you to play games from rival formats on your PC or console? In the late 1990s, that actually happened, when a west coast tech startup named bleem! tried to take on a gaming giant. And yet, while their use is legal if a little murky, emulators are generally frowned upon by video game publishers, and remain the preserve of hobbyists. As retro game prices continue to rise and old games become lost to time, emulation is an increasingly popular option for players looking to sample the classics.