In a segment on emulation on “CNET Central” circa 1998, GameCenter.com editor John Marrin argued that the gaming industry was more interested in the eventual emulation of current consoles than in the classic consoles. It was prophetic, and Sony filed a lawsuit in the first quarter of 1999 after the release of Connectix Virtual Game Station and Bleem. Remarkably, these emulators could run current games at full speed and were also sold in stores. His Psemu, an existing freeware PlayStation emulator, was not eligible because it required an unbundled copy of the system BIOS.
According to a 2017 Eurogamer article, Connectix had approached Sony about collaborating on VGS as a follow-up to Virtual PC, an Intel/x86 emulator for running Windows on PowerPC-based Macs. ,was denied. Instead, Connectix reverse engineered his PlayStation BIOS to create a non-infringing emulator. Bleem's much smaller development team said he had no idea what Connectix was doing, but Eurogamer articles and other sources show how they managed to use his BIOS as non-infringing. It is not clear whether it was avoided.
Two weeks after Connectix won the 1999 MacWorld “Best in Show” award, Sony filed a lawsuit alleging, among other things, that VGS bypassed PlayStation's copy protection and region locks. According to IGN at the time, this was a mistake. Sony also sued Bleem a few weeks later, and Eurogamer pointed out in 2017 that Sony's lawsuit is a slightly modified version of the complaint against Connectix. There was confusion about the lawsuit because Sony had not made a profit from its consoles, and in 2000 Eurogamer speculated that it was against Bleem's ability to operate pirated games.
