Several PlayStation-type hand controllers became available with VGS in mind. Graphics could be run full screen, at full speed. The impact of this product changed the available Macintosh game library from a very small, select group to nearly the entire collection of PlayStation games. It was advertised to run at full speed on the original 233 MHz iMac G3 system (relying on its built-in ATi graphics hardware), and in some cases it was able to run on 200 MHz 604e systems reasonably well.

Released at a time when the Sony PlayStation was at its peak of popularity, Virtual Game Station was the first PlayStation emulator, for any platform, that enabled games to run at full speed on modestly powerful computer hardware, and the first that supported the vast majority of PlayStation games. The recompiling CPU emulator was written by Eric Traut.

It was first released for the Macintosh, in 1999, after being previewed at Macworld/iWorld the same year by Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller. The Virtual Game Station (VGS) was an emulator by Connectix that allows Sony PlayStation games to be played on a desktop computer. 'Virtual Game Station' at the Wayback Machine (archive index)