Emulators arriving on the App Store was definitely one of the biggest news items of the year. It was something we lived and breathed here at Retro Dodo as we worked to document all of the changes and new arrivals over the weeks, immersing ourselves in Delta, RetroArch, PPSSPP, Gamma, and more. Finally having the chance to play games on our iPhones without jailbreaking or sideloading was brilliant, and it’s something that Delta creator Riley Testut told us all about in a recent interview for the Retrospect Podcast (which you’ll all hear very soon).
Riley had a long slog with Apple in order to be able to bring Delta to the App Store and pave the way for other emulators to come to the fold, jumping through Apple’s hoops and overcoming hurdles put in his way. But it turns out, in a strange turn of events, that Steve Jobs already had plans to make the Mac ‘the ultimate emulation device’ all the way back in 1999 with the arrival of a PS1 emulator.
Yes, the legendary face of Apple and the man who drove the company into becoming a global force wanted the Mac to be the greatest gaming machine ever made. Alongside Phil Schiller, he unveiled the first PlayStation emulator. It was called VGS (Virtual Game Station), a program made by Connectix that could run games on any platform at full speed. According to Overkill, Steve was proudly advertising that the $49 program was coming to Mac first and excited that Mac users would be able to run ‘a couple of hundred PlayStation games’ at the time on their computers. Schiller can even be seen loading up Crash Bandicoot at the Keynote event for the ecstatic audience members.
As you can imagine, while Jobs and Schiller were excited to have the Mac playing games from the most popular console at the time, Sony wasn’t too keen on the idea. They ended up taking legal action against Connectix and surprisingly lost, which meant they had to buy the software from Connectix in order to stop it from being used! How wild is that!
Things have changed a lot since 1999 and Apple’s rules and regulations have got much tighter over the years in many ways. To see Steve Jobs getting so excited about emulation 25 years ago, however, is pretty heartwarming. If only they had run with emulation back then; I could have been playing N64 games on the bus on my iPhone 3G instead of waiting for the iPhone 15 years later!
