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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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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