Two Programs Sony Could Not Tolerate
By the late 1990s the PlayStation was the most successful console in the world, and its value to Sony rested on a simple proposition: if you wanted to play PlayStation games, you had to buy Sony's hardware. Two small companies set out to break that proposition, independently and almost simultaneously.
Connectix began developing the Virtual Game Station in July 1998 — a Macintosh application that emulated the PlayStation, allowing genuine PlayStation discs to run on an Apple computer. Bleem!, released in March 1999, did the same thing for Windows PCs, and later for the Sega Dreamcast, of all things. Neither product pirated games; both required the player to own and insert a real, legitimately purchased disc. What they attacked was not Sony's software revenue but its hardware monopoly.
Sony sued them both.
The Ruling That Legalised Emulation
The Connectix case produced one of the most important rulings in the history of the medium. To build an emulator, Connectix had needed to understand the PlayStation's BIOS — the low-level firmware that games expect to find — and in the course of reverse-engineering it, the company had made intermediate copies of Sony's copyrighted code. Sony argued this was straightforward infringement.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, and did so emphatically. It held that copying copyrighted BIOS software during the development of an emulator does not constitute copyright infringement, because it is protected by fair use. The court reversed the district court on both the copyright claim and Sony's trademark tarnishment claim, and lifted the injunction that had been imposed on Connectix. Sony attempted to take the case to the Supreme Court and failed.
This is the legal foundation on which the entire emulation and preservation community rests. It establishes that reverse-engineering a console in order to make software that interoperates with it — copying code along the way, as any such effort must — is lawful. Every emulator you have ever used exists in the space that ruling defined.
Winning Anyway
And then Sony won. Having lost decisively against Connectix, it simply kept litigating against Bleem!. The legal question had been settled; the commercial question had not. Bleem! was a tiny operation with no meaningful capital, and defending itself against a corporation of Sony's size was ruinous regardless of the merits. It could win the argument and still lose the war, and it did. Bleem! ran out of money and shut down in November 2001.
Connectix survived only technically. About a year after the appellate ruling, the two companies settled out of court, and on 15 March 2001 Sony purchased the Virtual Game Station rights from Connectix outright — and promptly buried the product. Sony had lost in the courts and then acquired the thing it had failed to prohibit, ensuring that nobody would ever be able to buy it.
Both emulators were gone within two years of the ruling that vindicated them.
The Lesson Nobody Wanted
Legal scholars have picked over these cases ever since, and the thing they illuminate is uncomfortable. The law said emulation was legal. The outcome was that both emulators disappeared. Litigation costs money, and when one party has effectively unlimited money and the other has almost none, the merits of the case become close to irrelevant — a company can be right and still be destroyed by the expense of proving it.
The cases also foreshadowed a shift in tactics. Sony's copyright argument failed, so the industry increasingly turned to a different instrument: the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibit defeating technical protection measures regardless of whether any copyright has actually been infringed. That framework lets a platform holder attack an interoperable product without having to win a fair use argument at all — precisely the argument Sony lost.
The Connectix ruling remains good law, and emulator authors still rely on it. But the fate of Bleem! is the part of the story worth remembering, because it explains why so much emulation happens in the shadows, written by anonymous hobbyists and distributed for free. The people who tried to do it openly, commercially, and legally were proven right in court and put out of business anyway. Everyone who came after them learned the obvious lesson.