Game Over for bleem

bleem!, once a serious thorn in Sony Computer Entertainment's side, has given up the ghost this weekend. A full-page image of Sonic The Hedgehog weeping over a tombstone is all that can be found at bleem.com today. Many are speculating on the possible reasons for bleem!'s demise, but the most obvious one is that people simply don't need PSOne emulation any more. bleem! for the PC was a useful tool, but it was always fickle, falling apart at a moment's notice. And bleemcast!, the Dreamcast-based PSOne emulator, was excellent up to a point, emulating one game at a time and only three total at the time of the company's closure. The Dreamcast itself is no longer in production. It's not hard to see how a company built around emulating a six-year-old console on dying formats with the legal wrath of Sony against them would throw in the towel. Dreamcast has been in short supply for a while, and uptake of bleem! products at retail has always been sluggish. Nowadays PS2 is the dominant console, and bleem! is irrelevant as far as that's concerned because one of that console's most prominent features is backwards compatibility with the PSOne. If anything, it's surprising that they lasted as long as they did. We hope that bleem! founders Randy Linden and David Herpolsheimer find new work in the industry without delay. Related Feature - The bleem! Team