Oh, bleem! We hardly knew you.

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R.I.P. bleem!

By Lee Cieniawa

If you blinked, you may have missed the recent news concerning the demise of the bleem! company. The official bleem! website www.bleem.com, has a tear-shedding Sonic the Hedgehog paying a last tribute in front of a bleem! tombstone, dated April 1999-November 2001.

What was bleem!, whose utopian visions turned into nightmare realities for the little company that couldn't overcome videogame Goliath Sony? Bleem! was what sounded like a great idea, a software emulation-type program that would bring the original 32-bit PlayStation library of over 400+ games into the 128-bit generation by improving the graphical capability of the games to make them just as good-looking as any first-generation PS2 software. So what was the problem? The reason Sony so vehemently fought against bleem! is simple. The software bleem! developed specifically for the home console market would play the PlayStation games on a Sega Dreamcast, NOT a Sony hardware unit. That's a definite no-no in the cutthroat billion-dollar gaming industry. The software worked by using the bleem! CD as a "boot" disc, loading the graphic enhancing and cross-platform features into your Dreamcast before you placed a PlayStation game into the Dreamcast. You would still have to purchase the PlayStation game, but it would now be playable on the Dreamcast.

Originally intended to come out in four separate packs of 100 PlayStation game emulators on each disc, only three PlayStation games TOTAL out of the initially sought-after figure of 400 made it to the marketplace on individual bleem! CDs: Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Bleem!'s software packs were supposed to appear in early 2000. Because of all the legal roadblocks thrown in

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front of it by Sony's claims of copyright infringement, bleem! didn't make its official debut in retail stores until mid-2001. Kudos have to go out to Electronics Boutique, who were the only retail outlet not to be intimidated by Sony and placed bleem! for sale in their chain of stores.

Sony missed a golden opportunity with bleem!. Instead of being so concerned that the software would in effect keep new gamers away from the PSOne and

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drive them to the less-expensive Dreamcast, Sony should have welcomed the opportunity to sell even more PlayStation games, from which of course they receive a portion of the profits. But Sony was so paranoid that bleem! would prevent gamers from purchasing a brand new PS2. If gamers could get great graphics for all those titles on a Dreamcast, Sony reasoned, they wouldn't shell out the $300 bucks for a brand new PS2. The PS2 obviously had backward capability to play PlayStation software, but it did not improve the graphics of those games as bleem! promised on the Dreamcast.

One other significant factor that helped hasten the demise of bleem! is the ceasing of the production of new Dreamcasts. Sega's decision to exit the hardware business and become a software-only publisher and developer has had an impact on companies that relied on the Dreamcast for their bread-and-butter, such as bleem!. While there is still a significant Dreamcast base in North America, the 7 million or so Dreamcast owners pales in comparison to the approximately 40 million PSOne and PS2 owners.

And whether you are a Dreamcast owner already (or may be some time soon because of its new $50 dollar price) every home gaming-fan eventually falls into the same cycle of going along with the Joneses to get the newest home console-gaming goodies on the market. Right now that happens to be the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. Without the Dreamcast in production, bleem! didn't have a chance of lasting long. Much like the ill-fated Tucker automobile, having a great product doesn't always lead to market success, especially if Corporate Big Brother will take hits to its profitability.


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