bleem!

» see bleem.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

bleem! was sold in a cardboard box on a shelf in American computer stores, which is a sentence worth stopping on. Every other emulator of that era was a free download from somebody's personal page. This one had a price, a distributor and a place in the software aisle, sitting a few meters from the console it was built to replace.

Randy Linden wrote it and David Herpolsheimer ran the company selling it. The Windows version shipped in March 1999. You put a real PlayStation disc into your PC drive and the game ran on your processor, and if the machine was quick enough it looked better than the console managed, because it could draw the same game at whatever resolution your monitor supported. That was the pitch on the box: your own discs, sharper than the console managed.

Sony sued two days after preorders opened. By then bleem! had moved roughly twenty thousand copies directly through its own site, and the retail run went out through Navarre into CompUSA and Fry's. Having a marketing budget is what made it worth suing. Nobody sues a hobby project on a university web page.

None of this was reachable from where I was. In 1999 I was in high school on a dial-up line in Turkey, and the console economy here ran on gray imports and copied discs, so the problem bleem! sold a solution to, a lawful way to play games you had paid for on hardware you already owned, was not the shape the problem took locally. On top of that it was a physical American retail box, which meant a card that worked abroad and a shipping address I did not have.

~ the dossier ~

~ what you actually bought ~

The legal argument underneath the product was the same one Connectix had just won with the Virtual Game Station: you may study a machine and write your own program that behaves the way it behaves, as long as you do not copy the code. The Ninth Circuit had signed off on that reasoning in February 2000. bleem! was standing on solid ground and everyone involved knew it.

What it could not do was give you a game. You supplied the disc. The emulator handled everything the console would have handled, badly at first and then quite well, with a compatibility list that grew version by version and never covered the whole library. Version 1.6b, dated 16 August 2001, was the last one.

~ the lawsuits ~

Sony went at it three separate times. The first suit alleged copyright infringement and unfair competition and got nowhere. The second was stranger: Sony argued that bleem! could not put PlayStation screenshots in its own advertisements, and a district court agreed and issued an injunction. The Ninth Circuit reversed on 4 May 2000, holding that showing the same game side by side is comparative advertising and therefore fair use.

That decision is still cited. It is the reason a company can show you a competitor's product next to its own. bleem! won it while being financially destroyed by the process of winning it. The third suit arrived after the Dreamcast discs shipped and it was about patents, where defense costs run to roughly a million dollars per patent asserted. A company with twenty thousand direct sales cannot answer that, and no court ever had to rule.

~ the actual end ~

bleemcast! was the last swing. Instead of a PC program it was a bootable Dreamcast disc that made Sega's console play Sony's games, sold one title at a time. Gran Turismo 2 shipped in April 2001. Metal Gear Solid and Tekken 3 followed, and a WWF SmackDown! disc was announced and never came out.

The timing was hopeless. Sega had announced in January 2001 that it was done manufacturing the Dreamcast, so the platform bleemcast! ran on was already being cleared off shelves, and the PlayStation 2 was what people were saving for. The company closed in November 2001. Anyone who emailed the support address got a short reply that ended with the words "In a word, Dead." The site put up a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog mourning at a grave.

~ the long tail ~

Piko Interactive bought the trademark on 4 January 2021 and has been building a retro storefront under the name. The original domain went a different way. bleem.com today resolves to a flower and gift delivery service operating across the Gulf, which is the ordinary afterlife of a short word that somebody once paid to register.

The emulation projects that outlived it were the free ones. No revenue meant no assets, and no assets meant nothing worth suing for. A project with no address survives what a company with a distributor cannot. bleem! proved in court that what it did was lawful, and the proof cost more than the product ever earned.

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