PlayStation Portable

• 1. Introduction

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  The PlayStation Portable arrived in Japan on the 12th of December 2004, and within a single day more than 200,000 people had bought one. Sony's chief executive Ken Kutaragi called it the "Walkman of the 21st century" before it had ever reached a store shelf. That phrase was a deliberate provocation: Kutaragi was not pitching a game machine. He was pitching a new kind of object, one that could play films, stream music, browse the internet, and connect wirelessly to a television in the next room. Whether the world was ready for that kind of device - in a pocket, running on batteries, for under $250 - was a question nobody had answered. Nintendo had owned the handheld market for fifteen years. Every challenger had failed. The PSP was going to find out what happened when the most powerful portable hardware ever built went up against the best-selling handheld of all time.

• 2. A Market Nobody Could Crack

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  Nintendo launched the original Game Boy in 1989 and essentially made the handheld market its own. Sega's Game Gear pushed back from 1990 to 1997, and Bandai's WonderSwan competed in Japan from 1999 to 2004, but neither managed to dislodge Nintendo. The SNK Neo Geo Pocket and Nokia's N-Gage both tried and both fell short. An IDC analyst in 2004 described the PSP as the "first legitimate competitor to Nintendo's dominance in the handheld market", a label that acknowledged just how many had tried and missed.

  Sony had actually entered handheld gaming once before. In January 1999, the company released the PocketStation in Japan, a small memory card peripheral that doubled as a miniature game device. It sold briskly for a time but never expanded beyond Japan. The PSP was a fundamentally different proposition: not an accessory but a standalone system with two 333 MHz MIPS32 processors, a GPU running at 166 MHz, and a 4.3-inch LCD screen capable of 480 by 272 pixel resolution with 24-bit color. Those numbers outperformed the Nintendo DS's display by a significant margin.

  Sony's announcement came at a press conference preceding E3 2003, months before any hardware existed to show. The first concept images appeared at a Sony corporate strategy meeting in November 2003, featuring a model with flat buttons and no analog joystick. That omission alarmed observers who worried the final device would feel like a compromise. By the time Sony unveiled the real hardware at E3 2004, the analog nub had been added, and a list of 99 developer companies pledging support was released alongside it.

• 3. The UMD Gamble

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  Every PSP ever sold launched with a disc slot. The format was called Universal Media Disc, or UMD, and it made the PSP the only handheld console in history to use an optical disc as its primary storage medium. Films and games alike shipped on UMD, and for a window in the mid-2000s, Hollywood studios were releasing major titles on the format alongside DVD.

  The UMD drive was also the PSP's most persistent engineering headache. It drained the battery faster than any other component, and its read speeds were slow enough that some games built in lengthy loading pauses. WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006 required up to two minutes to load certain scenes. Developers learned to optimize how they arranged data on the disc specifically to minimize how often the drive had to spin up. Sony addressed the battery problem in part by restricting the CPU to two-thirds of its full speed for the first few years, a deliberate throttle intended to extend playtime.

  The original PSP shipped with an 1800 mAh battery that provided roughly three to six hours of gameplay. Sony eventually released an Extended Life Battery Kit in Japan in March 2008, housing a 2200 mAh cell behind a new cover designed to match the PSP's color options. The North American version of that kit, released in December 2008, came with two replacement covers: one black and one silver.

  Firmware version 3.50, released on the 31st of May 2007, finally removed the CPU speed restriction, allowing new games to run at the full 333 MHz the hardware had always been capable of. For many players, it felt like receiving a faster console they already owned.

• 4. Revisions and Dead Ends

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  The PSP-2000, marketed in PAL countries as the "PSP Slim & Lite", launched in Hong Kong on the 30th of August 2007 and rolled out across Europe, North America, South Korea, and Australia over the following two weeks. Its body was slimmer than the original, reduced from 23 mm to 18.6 mm, and lighter, dropping from 9.87 oz to 6.66 oz. The internal RAM doubled from 32 MB to 64 MB, which cut loading times on UMD games by using part of that memory as a cache. USB charging was added, and the directional pad was raised after user complaints about its performance on the first model.

  The PSP-3000 followed in October 2008 with what one outlet called "a minor upgrade": a new screen with five times the contrast ratio of the 2000, anti-reflective coating to cut outdoor glare, and a halved pixel response time. A microphone was built in. The 3000 sold over 141,270 units in its first four days in Japan, according to sales data from Famitsu, reaching 267,000 units across the full month of October.

  The PSP Go arrived on the 1st of October 2009 in North America and Europe and on the 31st of October in Japan. It was 43% lighter and 56% smaller than the original PSP-1000 and carried 16 GB of internal flash memory in place of any disc drive. Games had to be downloaded from the PlayStation Store, which meant the device was effectively tied to a single, region-locked PlayStation Network account. By February 2010, reports circulated that Sony was considering re-launching the Go due to poor sales. In June 2010 Sony began bundling ten free downloadable games with the console. On the 20th of April 2011, Sony announced it would discontinue the PSP Go outside North America to focus on its next handheld.

  The final model, the PSP Street (E1000), was announced at Gamescom 2011 and released across the PAL region on the 26th of October that year. It stripped out Wi-Fi, replaced the stereo speakers with a single mono unit, and dropped the microphone, all to reduce cost. An ice-white version followed on the 20th of July 2012.

• 5. Software and the Homebrew Wars

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  On the 15th of June 2005, hackers disassembled the PSP's code and distributed it online. What followed was a years-long chase between Sony's engineers and a community of programmers determined to run their own software on the hardware. Sony responded by repeatedly updating the system firmware; the homebrew community responded by finding new exploits. Custom firmware builds including M33 Custom Firmware, the Minimum Edition firmware known as ME/LME CFW, and PRO CFW became common on modified systems.

  Sony cancelled planned trophy support for the PSP specifically because of this threat. The company feared that players on hacked systems would be able to unlock or manipulate trophies illegitimately, making the feature meaningless. Peter Dillon, Sony's senior vice-president of marketing, acknowledged in a 2009 interview that game piracy was contributing to lower sales than the company had hoped for.

  The PSP's legitimate software library reached 1,370 titles over its ten-year lifespan. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories was the best seller, reaching 7.5 million copies as of the 20th of July 2013. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is the only PSP game to receive a perfect score from Famitsu. The last PSP game released was Retro City Rampage DX in July 2016.

  The system's most recent official firmware, version 6.61, was released on the 15th of January 2015. For those who wanted to experience the PSP library without original hardware, the emulator PPSSPP emerged as the most compatible option, capable of running all major games. The first PSP emulator, pspplayer by Noxa, was written in C# and appeared relatively soon after the console launched.

• 6. Marketing Controversies

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  In late 2005, Sony hired graffiti artists to spray-paint PSP advertisements across seven major American cities, including New York City, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The company said it had paid businesses and building owners for permission to use their walls. The campaign was noticed but did not generate lasting backlash.

  A year later, a poster in England reading "Take a running jump here" was removed from a tram platform at Manchester Piccadilly station after officials decided it might encourage suicide. Later in 2006 a billboard in the Netherlands depicted a white woman gripping a black woman by the jaw alongside the text "PlayStation Portable White is coming". Two related images existed: one showed the women facing each other, another placed the black woman in a dominant position. Sony said the intent was to contrast the white and black versions of the hardware. The advertisements were withdrawn from the Netherlands and never ran elsewhere, but the images had already attracted international coverage. Engadget wrote at the time that Sony may have hoped to "capitalize on a PR firestorm".

  In December 2006, Sony and the advertising firm Zipatoni ran a blog called alliwantforxmasisapsp.com designed to look like it had been created by two teenage friends. The blog featured downloadable PSP greeting cards, a video of "Cousin Pete" rapping about the handheld, and entries written in a mixture of what the authors called "leetspeak" and "smacktard". Tech-savvy readers found the blog's registration data through an online search and traced it to Gregory Meyerkord at Zipatoni, exposing the campaign publicly on the blog itself.

• 7. Sales Trajectory and Legacy

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  By March 2007, Sony had shipped 25.39 million PSP units worldwide: 6.92 million in Asia, 9.58 million in North America, and 8.89 million in Europe. Japan ultimately accounted for 19 million units sold, the United States for 17 million, and Europe for 12 million. The worldwide total reached 80 million over the console's ten-year lifetime.

  Those figures are large in absolute terms. Compared to the Nintendo DS, they tell a different story. During its lifetime, the PSP sold 80 million fewer units than the DS. The gap traced to a few structural differences. The DS attracted more third-party developers earlier, and its touchscreen and second display appealed more broadly to the casual market. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime had made the experience, rather than the hardware specifications, his public focus from the start.

  Hardware shipments to North America ended in January 2014. Sony announced on the 3rd of June 2014 that sales in Japan would also wind down. The PlayStation Vita, which launched in Japan in 2011, carried backward compatibility with PSP games purchased through the PlayStation Network, and that digital storefront became the main way to buy PSP titles in the console's final years. Sony shut down PSP access to the PlayStation Store on the 31st of March 2016. UMD production ended when the last Japanese factory making the discs closed in late 2016, drawing a physical line under a format that had briefly made going to a cinema feel optional on a long flight.