PocketStation

~ the goodbye ~

The PlayStation arrived in Turkey as a modded console and a shelf of copied discs. That model worked because software copies and hardware does not, and it meant an entire generation of accessories never made the trip. Whole categories of Sony's peripheral catalog existed here only as a photo in a magazine, and the PocketStation did not even get that far, because it was never sold outside Japan at all.

It shipped there on 23 January 1999 at 3,000 yen, a month later than the December date Sony had first given. Physically it was a standard memory card with a 32 by 32 monochrome screen on the front, five buttons around it, an infrared port on the edge and a coin cell in the back. Inside was an ARM7 core running at up to eight megahertz with 128 kilobytes of flash. It weighed thirty grams.

The trick was that a compatible game could write a small program onto the card along with the save. You docked it and the game filled it. Then you pulled it out and it kept running in your pocket on a battery the size of a button, and whatever you did out there came back into the main game when you slotted it in again.

What sold it was a cat. Doko Demo Issyo put Toro on the PocketStation and you taught him words while you were away from the console, which turned out to be worth more than a million and a half copies. Final Fantasy VIII used the same slot for Chocobo World, a side quest you ground out on a screen the size of a stamp and cashed in on the television later.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The support list was broader than people remember. Crash Bandicoot 3 and Ape Escape both wrote minigames to it, and a long tail of Japanese titles used it for pet raising or item generation while the console was off. The infrared port meant two of them could trade with each other without a PlayStation anywhere in the room.

Sega had done the shape first. The Visual Memory Unit came out in July 1998, six months earlier, and docked into a Dreamcast controller instead of the console. Sega's version shipped worldwide and Sony's did not, which is the reverse of how those two companies usually went.

~ the funny part ~

Sony's first shipment was 60,000 units and they were gone. The thing sold out across Japan and stayed hard to find for months. There had been promotion for a North American and European launch, and Sony's American arm then cancelled it, citing an inability to meet demand at home.

So a device died of being too popular in one country to be sold in any other. Nearly five million units moved, all of them inside Japan, and Sony ended production in July 2002 with the PlayStation 2 already two years into its run and no successor accessory planned. Success and distribution turned out to be separate problems.

~ what replaced it ~

Sony came back to it in November 2013, when Japanese PlayStation Plus members got a free PocketStation app for the Vita that emulated the card and its minigames. Doko Demo Issyo followed that December. A handheld with a five-inch screen pretending to be a memory card with a thirty-two pixel one, fourteen years after the original.

Everything the PocketStation did is now a phone notification. Your idle game keeps counting while you are on the bus and your save lives on somebody's server, so nothing needs a separate object with its own battery. It was the last serious attempt to make the save file a thing you carried, and it never left one country.

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