Universal Gaming

For those who don't know, Bleem! was a commercially-released emulator that made it to store shelves in 1997.

It just won't stop fascinating me how a no-name business like Bleem Company could take on a juggernaut like Sony head-on. Needless to say, the video-game giant was having none of it and quickly filled a lawsuit against the makers of Bleem! as soon as they began taken pre-orders for the emulator.

Shockingly enough, Sony lost on all counts (including a rather curious clause forbidding Bleem Company from showing actual screenshots of Playstation games on the packaging of the emulator). But they still won the battle, as the large legal fees and boycotts imposed by Sony on retailers (they would basically pull their products from stores carrying Bleem!) was more than what the little company could afford and they ended going out of business soon afterwards, with their assets and inventary being auctioned on E-bay... including a large collection of PS games that was used for testing.

I know what you are thinking: Even if Sony was somehow cool with this, how in the world could this be a profitable business model for Bleem!? Surely it would only take one legit user leaking the program online for it to inflict massive damage on their income. Well... they did something cool about it -at least from the manufacturer's perspective-: you could even download Bleem! for free from their website, but it wouldn't run unless you first inserted a key CD of sorts they prepared to guarantee that paying customers would not stop coming. Even if disc-swapping is a massive pain, I have mad respect for this technique, as it basically protects the product with a rather harmless practice.

And in case you are wondering, playing Bleem! today is pretty surreal experience. I'm sure this was top-notch by 97, but the emulation leaves a ton to be desired, struggling to keep the speed locked (meaning it would speed up and slow down seemingly at random) and having tons of graphics glitches popping up with every game tried. Still, as a curious piece of history, it surely has its own appeal.

I know a few people who were introduced to the Playstation and its library of games by playing Bleem!... and that ended up buying the console soon afterwards. It couldn't have been that bad for Sony, if that continued being the case across the board.

Oh, and I guess I should mention that Bleem Company were working on a PS1 emulator for Dreamcast, called Bleemcast! They released a few titles for it before going out of business, and it seems like it was pretty ok stuff.

What do you think, though? Ever heard of or tried Bleem!? What do you think of the whole idea? Share it with us.