Last Fall I interviewed Jeff Vavasour (parts one, two, three) and asked whether we'd ever see any game companies offering game ROMs in a pay-per-download service. Within a matter of days, StarROMs appeared in the public eye and caused a stir by offering several dozen classic Atari arcade ROMs for download, apparently legally, for a couple of dollars each. Shortly thereafter, I purchased several ROMs and enjoyed playing them in MAME, leading to one of the more curmudgeonly, controversial posts to ever grace this site.

Having already poked the ROM pirates with my sawed-off pointy stick, it seemed appropriate to needle the StarROMs people themselves. In the period shortly after their launch, however, StarROMs disappointingly declined my request for an interview. Being the patient type, I asked again recently and this time StarROMs co-founder Frank Leibly agreed to answer my questions.

Here, at last are answers to the big questions: How can StarROMs, a pay-to-download business, really expect to compete with the free, pirated ROMs people are already downloading? Have they been successful? And, are they really going to donate some of their earnings back to emulation projects like MAME?

jvm: Let's get right to the big questions. You've had your business open for nearly five months. Is StarROMs successful so far?

Frank Leibly: I think we're doing pretty good so far. Longer term, we aren't going to be happy until we get every copyright owner on board. And that's going to take some time. But I think we've made a lot of people very happy with what we have to offer now.

FL: This is really the same issue every copyright owner and media company has been dealing with for years. As a kid I bought blank tapes and copied records and tapes from my friends but when I got to the point when I could afford it I bought the CD's. And I still do. If you look at the demographic of who we're selling to, it's people in their 20's, 30's and 40's for the most part. Spending a few bucks is pocket change and it's worth it to know you're dealing with someone legitimate. I like to think the service we provide is worth something too.

I also think the illegal sites are going to continue to experience pressure and when you get right down to it I'm not sure I see the point of putting up illegal roms if there is a legal source available.

We're also starting to work with some folks who are selling MAME cabinets who want to provide their customers roms legally. These customers are spending big money and they deserve to get something that's fully legitimate rather than pirated.

FL: We had a rights issue emerge with respect to ten of the titles we were initially offering, where a third party came along and said that they had rights to these games and that we couldn't sell them without their approval. We hope to offer these games again in the future, but for the time being we agreed to settle this issue amicably by pulling the titles from our offering.

FL: Yes, the license is still valid. Likewise, we will continue to provide support for customers who have purchased these games through us, including providing update ROM versions if necessary.

FL: So far we've contributed $500 to the MAME team, and plan to make additional contributions in the future. It's unclear what kind of financial support we'll be able to provide on an ongoing basis or where it will go but we'd like to think that our contributions will add some value and make a difference.

FL: It's a frustratingly long process to put these deals together. There is a reason that no one else has done this so far. It's a long term process. You have to keep in mind that emulation is a bad word in many circles. So at pretty much every company we've talked to there are folks who are on board with what we're doing and others who can't get past the E word. So it's a matter of getting to the right people. Then there is also the legal hurdle involved in rights clearances and putting together a licensing deal. We started talking to Atari/Infogrames over a year ago, well ahead of anyone else we've approached. We had hoped we would have the deal wrapped up by Q1 2003 but it took until September, and not because of any hitches but just because it really takes that long to do a complex licensing agreement.

FL: Atari has been a great partner for StarROMs. We've talked about PR and promotional activities. We'll probably do an announcement together in the future.

FL: I don't think there were any legal hurdles per se. These deals just don't happen overnight, especially when you are dealing with a big company.

FL: My partner Jay Coulson and I previously founded a company called NFIC - New Frontiers Information Corp., while we were finishing up school together at MIT. NFIC was a very, very early player in web e-commerce and on-line development. We sold the business pretty early on to Banta Corporation, a large printer, who was able to help us expand the business significantly by providing us with access to the large publishers and other clientele that they served. So we spent quite a few years seeing the publishing industry struggle with the advent of the Internet and electronic distribution. After we left Banta we both eventually got the itch to do something entrepreneurial again but we wanted to do something that was going to be really fun. Jay was the one who suggested we do something related to classic arcade games, and it didn't take long before we decided there was a real opportunity to create a business to legally distribute ROMs. That was about a year and a half ago.

FL: All of the roms we sell were originally tested on past versions of MAME and MacMAME under MacOS 9. We have had to play catch up as new versions of MAME are released, obviously. We had a fair amount of support related to the Gauntlet rom change for .76 and I know there are a bunch of affected ROMs for .77 that we had to deal with. It runs fine on my OS X machine and we haven't had any complaints that I'm aware of. I'd be curious to find out from Ruffin what problem he ran into.

So far we haven't seen many platform related issues to my knowledge. I believe there are problems with Tempest on the latest version of MacMAME for OS X, but I expect that will be resolved with the next release.

FL: No, we haven't up until this point. This is one of many things we'd love to do in the future, time and resources permitting.

FL: Every title we offer needs to be evaluated on an individual basis. We aren't selling anything where sound is not working, for example. Likewise, we won't sell it if we encountered problems during testing. I think Lunar Lander gives a warning but it appeared to play fine in our testing so we are selling it but I think there is a note about it in our description. It's actually a title that users can get for free by setting up a new account. For some of the more recent games, we found that they require a pretty fast computer in order to emulate them reasonably well. We try to make a note of this in the descriptions. We get user feedback too which is always helpful.

FL: As you probably know, there are some fantastic products out there that can enhance the PC gaming experience. I'm talking about a broad range of controllers, or on the high end, full blown arcade cabinets that really bring the arcade experience into your home. From a business perspective, we've already built a large registered user base and it makes sense to expose these users to other emulation related products that they are likely to be interested in. Our core business is and will continue to be offering a legal source for game roms, but you can expect to see us enter into partnerships with companies who are offering other gaming related products in the future.

FL: Thanks again for your interest, Matt.