PlayStation Portable

~ the eulogy ~

kids on european school buses had a psp. boys on the long lufthansa flight to istanbul had a psp. that was not my crowd. by 2005 i was twenty-one, on a ttnet adsl line, mostly playing counter-strike at the cafe and ultima online private servers at home. handhelds were a thing for the demographic that still had homework, and i had finished mine.

sony launched the psp in japan on december 12, 2004, and the rest of the world followed through 2005. the device had a 4.3-inch screen at 480x272 and ran games off a sony-designed optical disc called the umd. it explicitly framed itself as the walkman of the gaming world. nintendo launched the ds eight months earlier with worse hardware on paper and won the generation anyway.

by march 2012 the psp had sold 76.4 million units lifetime. that is more than the original gameboy if you measure right, and a long way short of the ds, which had cleared 154 million by the same point. by 2014 sony had wound down production region by region, with the last factory orders wrapping at the end of the year. the final new psp game release was a port of retro city rampage in 2016.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

in turkey the psp was a luxury kid's gift, never close to mass adoption. you would see one in someone's hand on the bus, almost always belonging to someone whose family had money to spare on imported electronics. the umd format also meant you needed physical discs that nobody had brought into turkish stores in any volume, so the actual play library on a turkish psp was downloads off forums, run on a cracked firmware. the psp in turkey was the second device most kids did not actually get.

~ the unraveling ~

the psp had two real problems on top of bad timing. the umd was bigger and more expensive than nintendo's tiny cartridges, and the laser spinning the disc broke battery life every time you opened a game. the d-pad and shoulder buttons were also laid out for a console controller, not a thumb, so most psp games shipped feeling like compressed ps2 ports rather than handheld games designed from scratch. the bad-timing part arrived in 2007 with the iphone, which made the premise of the device obsolete inside two years.

~ the funny part ~

the psp's actual cultural footprint in europe and asia was as a media-piracy box. cracked firmware turned it into a console emulator and a media player for whatever you could load on the memory stick. for everything except the things sony actually wanted you to do with it, the psp was excellent. that is also true of most sony hardware of the era.

~ the long tail ~

the umd never showed up in any other product after the psp. sony tried briefly with the umd-video format for movies, which also died. the device's afterlife is on emulators now, where the bigger psp library, including the games never released outside japan, gets played at full speed on phones that, ironically, look about the same size as the psp itself.

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