20 Years Ago, PlayStation Gave Us A Glimpse Of The Multimedia Future

While it may be hard to believe at a time when any and everybody is making gaming handhelds, there was a time when just one company dominated the portable business. Barring a few solid attempts from Neo Geo and Sega in the ‘90s, Nintendo essentially cornered the market right from its inception thanks to brand recognition, impeccable game design, and the foresight to focus on battery life over fidelity.

After 15 years of the Game Boy ruling portable gaming, however, a worthy challenger in Sony finally stepped up to compete with Nintendo’s juggernaut. Few were better positioned to do so, and on paper, it couldn’t have been a better time. Sony had already bullied its way into the console market, with its first console outselling its contemporaries and the second well on its way to becoming the best-selling of all time. And with Nintendo ditching the Game Boy brand for its Dual Screen experiment, entering into the portable ring was a no-brainer.

Thus, in December 2004, Sony would release the PlayStation Portable in Japan. As a handheld, the hardware would have a solid run, with plenty of games folks remember fondly even 20 years later. But its remarkable marriage of hardware and software is more impressive than any of its games. Sony’s PSP was a one-of-a-kind multimedia device far, far ahead of its time. It’s the progenitor of the iPhone Apple will never acknowledge and the great-great-grandfather of Nintendo’s Switch in spirit. The PSP deserves its flowers for being as bold as it tried to be, even if it mostly fell flat on its face.

The PSP was an unfathomable device back in 2004. Not only did it play games that looked comparable to console games of the time (something most consumers thought they wanted at the time), it was capable of playing music, displaying photos, and even movies. Those in Europe and Japan could purchase attachments that allowed it to take photos or provide GPS navigation. And it didn’t need a monthly contract like the Blackberry’s totted by businessmen and women.

It was an all-in-one device straight out of science fiction. And yet, here it was with its gorgeous widescreen display, Frutiger Aero face and shoulder buttons, and a damn analog stick.

I got a PSP for my 12th birthday, shortly after its U.S. release. And it was every bit as unbelievable as I imagined. It was mindblowing to go from playing Need For Speed Underground to watching a UMD copy of Spider-Man 2 to listening to the two Eminem tracks I could squeeze onto the 32-megabyte memory stick the console came with. I wasn’t just living in the future. The PSP brought it to my fingertips.

Things only got better by the summer as Sony added a fully functioning web browser via a free software update. For many, this was the first time we could surf the web in the palm of our hands without a cellular company charging us for the privilege. A burgeoning internet homebrew scene encouraged me to check out emulators and indie games for the first time. Up-and-coming writers were making free zines formatted for the PSP’s screen. In the mid-2000s, Sony’s handheld was its own little online ecosystem unlike any other.

With all of this working in its favor, it seems like it should have become just as popular as the other consoles that came before. Alas, it did not. That weird two-screened device Nintendo released? Turns out it’s one of the greatest gaming devices of all time, once again thanks to brand recognition, impeccable game design, and the foresight to focus on battery life over fidelity (if Nintendo is anything, it's consistent).

But the PSP’s shortcomings weren’t just about what the competition was doing right. While the PSP was capable of doing virtually everything, it did them all just slightly worse than more dedicated devices of the time. As a music player, the PSP was good. So long as you were willing to shell out obscene amounts of money for proprietary memory sticks, something that Apple’s increasingly popular iPod didn’t require. It also wasn’t the most ergonomically convenient device to fit into a pocket, even in the big jeans of the early-aughts.

As a video player, it was awesome. But as time went on, UMD support from major movie studios was hit or miss. This coincided with portable DVD players finally becoming affordable. And while MP4s could play on the device, digital video wasn’t a thing just yet. Even the PSP’s ability to surf the web, while neat, was more of a novelty in an era where most media consumption wasn’t centered around an internet connection.

At launch, the PSP was the undisputed multimedia device. But by the end of 2005, everyone else was starting to catch up and fast. The iPod Video landed in November and Microsoft’s Zune followed close behind. As a gaming device, the Nintendo DS library ran circles around it as players realized mobile-friendly titles fare better than retrofitted PS2 games. By 2007, the end-all-be-all of all-in-one devices, the iPhone 4, would change humanity forever, thwarting Sony’s dream once and for all.

The PSP was the stuff of dreams that Sony made into reality. The vision for what it was supposed to be was way ahead of its time, even if that vision was muddied by limitations both technical and self-imposed. Still, it should be remembered as one of the earliest affordable smart devices consumers could purchase.