PlayStation Portable 20th Anniversary – Is that a PlayStation in your pocket?

thesixthaxis.com:

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