Bleem!

Having a dream in the world of game production is a little like moving to Japan: The culture is different, they speak a language you don’t understand, and you run into more problems than you’d ever thought possible. In 1998, a small cadre of people in Los Angeles came together with one simple dream: to bring the world of PlayStation gaming to the PC. Sure, there were other emulators – programs designed to make a PC “think” like a console – out there, but they were hoary things that ran like they were moving through mud. Their emulator would be different; their emulator would zip and work perfectly; their emulator was going to be the next big thing. First, a little background: Emulators work by reverse engineering the software and hardware processes on a console (or any device which you’d like to mimic). When bleem!’s team formed, early consoles were already popular: Super Nintendo, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, all were relatively easy to bring into existence, because a computer can easily crunch 8- and 16-bit numbers on top of running an operating system. The PlayStation was a different beast, however. Rather than working from storage cartridges with 256 MB of space, it could read from multiple CDs containing full-motion video and 3-D graphics. And that addition of a third dimension made emulation especially difficult, because emulator developers had to reverse engineer the way consoles processed information through their proprietary graphics accelerators. Emulators at that time used software rendering to create the 3D graphics, which proved too much for even top-of-the-line machines in the late ’90s. The real star of the PlayStation emulation scene was bleem! (short for the Best Little Emulator Ever Made). Coded in assembly, this small executable made use of video cards on PCs and used filtering technology that, in many cases, made the games look better than they did on the actual PlayStation. Also, unlike most other emulators, bleem! worked on compatibility for each individual game, instead of trying to generally reverse engineer the console process. Elsewhere, the concept of emulation was viciously attacked by the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA, now the Entertainment Software Association [ESA]). In 1998, the “great sweep” took place, shutting down most of the major emulation sites in existence within a six-month period. But they had no preparation for the flood of emulators that appeared in 1999, chief among them bleem! All the major players were concerned. Console manufacturers often lose a great deal of money on the consoles and make up for it in licensing fees for games. At the time, Sony’s per-game licensing fee was around $10, its largest profit margin. If people could play PSX games anywhere they liked, how could Sony justify that exorbitant fee? bleem!’s developers spent a year analyzing how the PlayStation read and processed games, making sure not to accidentally learn any secrets to which they had no rights. Despite the long development time, bleem! did have its problems, since reverse engineering is rarely an entirely stable procedure. Bugs racked most every game, though they remained, by and large, playable. And, unlike other emulators for earlier consoles (which obviously couldn’t read the cartridges) bleem! could read and use the original PlayStation games, which had to be bought in order to work with the program. This, they thought, was the best way to keep Sony from causing them grief. “We don’t expect any problems from Sony. We’ve taken every possible step to ensure the security of not only our software, but have also worked to protect the rights of Sony and PlayStation developers in general. … So I don’t know how we can protect ourselves any more than we have,” David Herpolsheimer, bleem!’s President and CEO, told IGN in ’99. It didn’t work. In March of 1999, two days after bleem! began taking preorders, Sony filed suit against the fledgling company. bleem! was a small company of just two