We almost didn’t see it coming, but suddenly we’re gearing up for an Apple evening event where video games could take center stage like never before. My gamer side is thrilled about this, but it’s not the first time Apple has suddenly turned to the gaming market.
It turns out that Steve Jobs, at a time when the original iMac was still the novelty that surprised everyone, showed up at a keynote and started running PlayStation games like it was nothing on one of those iMacs. The moment was mythical, but in Sony’s offices it felt very, very bad.
“For $49 you can turn your Mac into a Sony Play Station.”
“Our goal is to deliver the best gaming machine in the world,” Jobs was saying at the 1999 Macworld event. Suddenly, Apple’s CEO was showing the original PlayStation on the projector: “This is the most popular gaming machine right now. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to play some of their games?”
The audience began to gasp in surprise. Steve Jobs goes on to mention the ‘Virtual Game Station’ program created by Connectix. Yes, an emulator, developed by Aaron Giles in 1998 after garnering experience emulating Windows games and applications on macOS at that company.
“For $49 you can turn your Mac into a Sony Play Station,” Steve Jobs continued. Then Phil Schiller appeared demonstrating how you could buy games from that console and run them on the Mac. A perfect remedy to give fuel to the rather scarce offer of games on the platform.
Sony’s response: everyone to court.
As Aaron himself tells it, the presentation was not the best idea ever. Apple’s plan was to ask him to create this emulator for Mac, and present it to Sony once they had it finished and fine-tuned to convince them to make a deal and allow that emulator to be sold without problems. It turned out okay.
As soon as Sony saw that result, they sent a cease and desist letter to Connectix preventing them from using the official code to compile the Game Station emulator. Connectix’s response? To go ahead and have Aaron Giles use reverse engineering to develop the emulator. It was just in time to be able to create that great moment at Macworld in 1999, where Steve Jobs claimed that a $49 program could save you a PlayStation.
Sony couldn’t stop Game Station from going on sale, and quite a few copies of the application were sold before the Japanese lawyers did their job. Once the lawsuit had been filed, the emulator had to be withdrawn from stores.
That was a first blow for Game Station, although there was a much more natural one: there was already talk of the PlayStation 2, a completely new and more advanced system that quickly caught the interest of the whole community. By the time Sony won the lawsuit and locked the emulator code away from use, interest in PlayStation games was already too low.
Maybe now that can’t happen again, but we are in a market where a keynote dedicated to Mac gaming could break the mold again. We can find out in a few days.