Macworld 1999 had two absolutely doomed gaming announcements.
The first was that Halo would be coming to the Mac, which... ha ha, whoops!
The second…
Steve Jobs: “Again our goal is to have the best game machine in the world.
Now, this is another game machine. It’s the most popular game machine in the world.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could play some of those titles too?”
Steve Jobs introduces a new killer app for the Mac.
A Playstation emulator, the Connectix Virtual Game Station.
Jobs hoped the software would turn the Mac into a legitimate game platform overnight
by low-key pirating Sony’s game library.
Steve Jobs: “It is software that they’re gonna
sell for $49 that turns your Mac into a Sony Playstation. It plays… a few hundred,
it it plays a few hundred of the Sony Playstation games today.”
Emulators have always been a pretty grey market. Emulation websites in the '90s were
a lot like fanfics in the '90s – they all came with these watery disclaimers about
how they "don’t own any of this, please don’t sue us!" Not legally binding!
So when I saw this clip I was really surprised to see Steve Jobs on a stage, just straight up repping an emulator.
Just blatantly out there being like, “Thanks for the games, Sony!”
That's my Steve Jobs impression.
This was only 5 years before this ad campaign aired, and only 8 years before this ad
campaign was pirated and uploaded to YouTube! For as long as I can remember, Mac has been
aggressively advertised as the “productivity” machine, for creative types. Intel even dunked
on that fact just last year in their endearingly ill-conceived “I’m a Justin” ad campaign.
Justin Long: And uh, do we have a Mac gamer?
Gamer: Tsh, noone really games on a Mac. Justin Long: Tsssh… I know….
My first instinct upon seeing that Macworld clip is that the VGS actually represents
how little Jobs cared about Mac gaming. An emulator was the easiest, cheapest way to
increase Mac’s game library without putting too much effort in. You don’t have to woo publishers or
make your platform enticing to developers.
But Apple’s user base was tiny in the late '90s. Game makers didn’t want to waste the effort of porting
their games for such a small audience. Retailers didn’t want to waste shelf space for this niche
little company. So an emulator was actually a pretty brilliant strategy to expand Apple’s
game repertoire. Despite a real visible lag, the demo of
the emulator was impressive. Connectix sold out of the Virtual Game Station at Macworld.
Embarrassed to say that that one took me a moment to piece together. Like, how they manage to sell out of a
software? It's cause the software was on discs and they ran out of discs.
I have not bought a piece of software on a disc since Everquest.
Up till this era, emulators weren’t particularly prominent… or good.
There were a few fan-project emulators for older consoles,
but for the most part they weren’t really comparable to the originals. And basically no emulators
directly competed with a current generation console.
Like the fact that the VGS had this visible lag still meant it was one of the better emulators on the market.
The long and short of it is that emulators were pretty underground.
But early 1999 saw a bunch of current-generation, high-quality emulators drop.
Aside from the Mac-backed Virtual Game Station, there was UltraHLE for the Nintendo 64
and Bleem!, which emulated PlayStation for PCs.
This is like the part in Jaws where you can see the fin in the water but no blood has been spilt yet.
Video game journalists waited breathlessly to see when, not if, the creators of these emulators would be sued.
So, Sony sued. Like, of course they did. But it's not for the reasons I expected.
I expected Sony to care about people not buying the PlayStation.
An emulator would undercut PlayStation sales, since people could just buy the games.
But Sony didn’t care about that! Weirdly, it would have benefitted Sony if fewer people
bought the console, and more people bought games. The PlayStation 1, like most console hardware even
today, was a “loss leader” — Sony actually loses money on each console sale. They do this because
the real money is from selling licenses and the games themselves.
So if there were, say, another audience, like Mac users, out there buying games without buying a console,
that would be great news for Sony. It would expand the part of their business that is actually profitable.
So why did Sony sue?
Well the Playstation 1, like most consoles of the era,
had built-in anti-piracy and region-locking features. This was because of the video game crash
of 1983, which almost destroyed the video game industry. Unlicensed 3rd party developers
churned out rip-offs and cash-grabs, and console developers could only watch as the
market flooded with garbo bullshit. Consumers lost faith in games and the market dried up.
As a result, the industry that resurrected afterwards was really concerned with piracy
and unlicensed games. It's part of the reason Nintendo still uses cartridges instead of discs.
Discs are really easy to copy.
And while, of course, I could just get my best friend to burn a CD-Rom copy of Gex for me,
the Playstation's anti-piracy tech means the hardware wouldn't actually play it.
Region-locking had a similar purpose. Publishers pay Sony crazy stacks of money to license
games for release in specific regions. If players bought games in the UK and brought them back to the US,
some publishing partners in some markets would make more money than others. And they just hated that!
Sony was concerned that the Virtual Game Station could be modded to get around these anti-piracy and
region locking features. And they were right, it happened immediately!
Suddenly, your friend COULD just burn a copy of Gex 2: Enter the Gecko and give it to you!
And you could play it! And then Sony didn't get any of that Gex money!
Connectix updated the software with anti-piracy measures, but like… it was really only a matter
of time till modders broke through those as well. So it’s not surprising that Sony launched a lawsuit
against Connectix for copyright infringement. What is surprising, is that Sony lost!
In software, the functionality isn’t the copyrighted aspect;
the actual source code itself is the protected object. If you copy-and-paste the code then yeah,
that’s a copyright violation. But if you take the time to write original code from
scratch that does the same thing – for instance, read a Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko
Playstation disc – then that’s all fine and good. This is known as “reverse-engineering.”
This was actually established in a really important court case from 1992,
Sega v Accolade. Accolade wanted to publish Sega games without being licensed – which, again,
was a thing that hardware developers were really afraid of. Sega pushed back and lost
under fair use laws, effectively legitimating this reverse-engineering method of software production.
Connectix was able to prove that they reverse engineered the code for VGS. Their emulator
was original content, and therefore legal. Sony also sued Bleem! and lost once again,
but Sony was such an effective legal pest, Bleem eventually shut down regardless.
This is to say nothing of ROMs. UltraHLE required a ROM of a cartridge to emulate a game.
So it more proactively encouraged piracy.
Connectix and Bleem were in the clear because their software, as intended,
still required you to buy rumored game Gex 4: Geckos Never Die, in order to play it.
The UltraHLE devs wisely folded immediately upon legal threat from Nintendo and the creators went dark on the internet.
Emulators are legal, and these are the battles that set that precedent.
But like a lot of stuff in the American legal system,
there's a big asterix in the corner that leads to a footnote that says,
“*if you have enough money to defend yourself.”
Unable to best Connectix in court, Sony gave in and just… bought VGS from them.
Remember: if you can’t beat ‘em, consume them.
The official party line from Sony was that this partnership would expand their emulation options.
But this is the last we hear from the Virtual Game Station.
This was pretty much the end of the totally legal software emulation side industry.
Video game console emulation still exists, obviously,
but not as like, a real, legitimate business.
You can find plenty for free online – strictly for fair-use game history
preservation and research purposes only, of course. This moment, in Macworld 1999, could have been
the end of console-exclusive games. It could've changed or entirely subverted the console vs PC debates.
Instead, we could've have been an equally meaningless console vs PC vs Mac debate! Awww.
But who needs emulators anyway when we have all these re-releases and remakes
and remarsters and warmasters and ports and re-releases and re--