There’s a remarkable synergy to PlayStation hitting its 30th Anniversary at right around the same time the PSP marks its 20th. Sony are exactly the kind of company to gift their fans a perfectly formed handheld device on their 10th birthday, but its success was hardly guaranteed, despite the remarkable foothold the Japanese tech giant had found in the games industry. They were entering waters that Nintendo ruled over at the time, who themselves were following up on the Game Boy Advance with the somewhat confounding dual-screen Nintendo DS. There was every possibility that Sony’s effort would be swallowed up, and while they never quite usurped the dominion built on Tetris and Italian moustaches, the PSP was an innovative, powerful and occasionally bonkers device that changed the face of handheld gaming forever.
I still have a PSP. That’s probably a given, but I thought I should clear it up from the start. It’s a Japanese Monster Hunter special edition, with enlarged rear handholds to make it more comfortable, and a stunning black and gold paintjob. I love it, and it handily ties together a number of the most important things about the PSP: its popularity and success in Japan, and the role and importance that Monster Hunter played within that.
Launching in 2004, the PSP was the perfect next step in Sony’s foray into the games industry. Just as it had done with the original PlayStation and its successor, Sony produced a piece of hardware that was built for that technological era. Its 4.3” widescreen LCD display was also incredibly sharp, detailed and huge for the time, and allowed developers to make the most of its powerful dual 333MHz chipset (originally limited to 222Mhz) and 32MB of memory. Those are amusingly small numbers by today’s standards, but they were incredible at the time in this form factor, not least when compared to Nintendo’s quirky and underpowered DS line.
Sony also sought to repeat a few tricks from its home consoles by using optical media with the UMD, allowing for much larger game sizes compared to Nintendo DS and GBA cartridges, and a cottage industry of selling films on UMD for portable movie watching. Add to that the use of Memory Stick Duo for save data and WiFi, the PSP was set up for a future that would include the early PlayStation Store and online multiplayer.
At launch, the PSP had a host of killer software. Prime among them, an amazing version of Ridge Racer – honestly, I still play it to this day – and Sony’s answer to Tetris in the form of Lumines. Lumines embodied the PlayStation difference in such a succinct way, taking a block-dropping puzzler, leaning on club and dance music, and then tying the experience together with a surreal and ever-changing colour scheme. Its sequel took it one step further, adding in licensed music tracks, with both destroying any sense of time or place, especially when you added a pair of headphones to the mix.
Elsewhere, that launch line-up catered to the PlayStation faithful with games like Wipeout Pure and Twisted Metal: Head On while hoping to draw in newcomers with a keen eye for the biggest sports titles, bringing FIFA, NBA, NHL, MLB and NFL to the party from day one. That’s not to say there weren’t also the oddities that would help to define the PSP as a place for more unusual experiences, and at the head of that was Metal Gear Acid, a game that translated the successful Metal Gear Solid stealth-action line into a tactical card-based strategy title. I still don’t quite understand it, and I’ve bought it three times.
Then there was Monster Hunter. This wasn’t where the series started, but as sure as a Rathalos is red (except when its blue), this was where it found its success. Monster Hunter Freedom rebalanced the game to make it a better singleplayer experience, but it was the PSP’s ability to hook up with other consoles for multiplayer that cemented Monster Hunter within the Japanese consciousness. I marvelled at tales of people spending their lunchbreaks sat on benches and playing Monster Hunter – especially as a lonely Monster Hunter player in the UK – but in Japan, Monster Hunter, and the PSP, were a phenomenon, and sales for the console and the game were huge.
While the PSP would have still had success without Monster Hunter – it went on to sell nearly 80 million units after all – it ensured that it was part of the Japanese development scene at its height, and that then in turned played into the vibrant and often unusual software that became available for it.
Idiosyncratic exclusives like Patapon and LocoRoco sat happily next to hugely impressive entries in Sony’s tentpole series like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories and God of War: Ghost of Sparta. It felt as though the PSP wasn’t just a handheld, but a real, fully grown console, and owners will undoubtedly wax lyrical about just how good the games for it were, whether it was RPGs, puzzlers or action titles.
This was a time when Sony was still able and willing to be adventurous, putting the resources and faith into games away from their main home console line up. It was a sign of both the power of the PSP and the quality of its line up that games like the GTA Stories spin-offs, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and Ready at Dawn’s God of War games were later ported to PS2 or remastered for PS3.
Was it perfect? Far from it, and one of the clearest oversights was the inclusion of only one analogue stick, just as the world was becoming used to two. This caused all sort of control craziness – trying to play with both the D-Pad and the analogue stick requires your hands to be in a position known as ‘the claw’ – but overall it didn’t detract from the games too much, with some interesting implementations to combat it like constantly spamming the right shoulder button to reset the camera behind you.
UMDs were also a blessing and a curse, with the physical disc media proving to be hugely power hungry and slow to read from, while they could also be damaged despite being in a plastic case, and movie releases for the format were both expensive and less complete than their DVD siblings. UMD never found their way into any other devices other than the PSP, ultimately meaning that the format was abandoned by studios long before the PSP actually died out. Still, I love – LOVE – the ‘schnikt’ sound the PSP makes when its reading from them, and the format’s comparatively huge storage capacity meant that PSP games looked and sounded far superior to anything Nintendo’s handhelds could muster.
The PSP’s legacy is clear to see today. Though its successor the PS Vita never enjoyed anywhere near the same level of success, thanks in part to the rise of mobile gaming, but also a lack of first party support, handheld gaming has now come out the other side with the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck. Meanwhile, many of its best series have made the leap to home consoles – Mizuguchi, we need a new Lumines game please – and Monster Hunter, far from being just a handheld experience, is now an all-conquering behemoth, taking the world by storm.
If Sony do make a new handheld, as has been rumoured this last month, here’s hoping that they look to the design philosophy of the PSP; a cutting edge piece of technology, with Sony’s biggest franchises, but one that has room for the quirkier side of gaming. And one that, twenty years on, will have the same level of impact on people’s gaming lives.
