PSP Retrospective: The Handheld That Finally Gave Nintendo A Fight

The PSP was the first handheld in a decade to give Nintendo real competition. Every challenger before it, from Sega's Game Gear to Nokia's N-Gage, had failed or underperformed. Sony's machine, however, was the most powerful portable console of its day, and it remains the only one ever to use an optical disc, the Universal Media Disc, as its main format for games and movies alike.

The discs were a mixed blessing, though. They meant longer load times and loading noise, and they drained the battery faster than the DS did. Even so, the PSP sold over 80 million units in ten years, which still makes it the best-selling handheld not made by Nintendo.

Key facts

Released

December 12, 2004 in Japan, March 24, 2005 in North America, September 1, 2005 in EuropeSource

Launch price

¥19,800 in Japan, US$249.99 in North AmericaSource

Units sold

Over 80 millionSource

Best-selling game

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, 8 million copiesSource

Media

Universal Media Disc (UMD), plus downloadsSource

Screen

4.3-inch widescreen, 480 by 272 pixelsSource

Discontinued

January 2014 in North America, June 2014 in Japan, December 2014 in EuropeSource

How Sony put most of a PS2 in a pocket

Sony announced the PSP just before E3 2003, and CEO Ken Kutaragi called it the "Walkman of the 21st century" because it was meant to do far more than play games. Besides games it played movies on UMD and music or video copied to the memory card, and with an internet connection it even had a web browser. Under the hood it was not too different from a sixth-generation console like the PS2, if not quite on the same level.

All that power asked a lot of the battery. Sony held the processor to two-thirds of its full speed for the first few years, while the UMD drive drained power and read slowly, so developers had to arrange their data to touch the disc as little as possible. Some games still loaded for up to two minutes in certain scenes. (Two minutes is long enough to reconsider a wrestling game.)

Still, the launches went well. Japan sold over 200,000 units on the first day, and in the UK all stock sold out within three hours, more than doubling the first-day record the Nintendo DS had set. Third parties brought most of the PS2's big series, God of War and Metal Gear Solid among them, and the PSP got quite a few exclusives of its own. The PlayStation Vita replaced it from December 2011, and hardware shipments ended worldwide in 2014.

The best PSP games

Ranked by how often players recommend them, with picks other players backed counting extra. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII takes #1, and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite makes the top five.

Every PSP list

Handhelds for PSP games

More than half of the handhelds in our database play PSP games well, so this is one of the easier systems to take with you again.