Sony's PlayStation Portable, while hardly a failure, hasn't really caught on the way most were expecting it to around the time of its launch back in 2004. Why? Because, as one developer says, it was "doomed".
"It was doomed from the very get-go", says Ready At Dawn's Ru Weerasuriya. "There are some things which aren't conductive to calling it a true portable gaming platform and calling it a connective platform, although it has wi-fi."
"There's so many things that publishers and the manufacturer and Sony dropped the ball on - it's natural, it's the first one."
What's interesting about this isn't what's being said - as most people (outside Japan, at any rate) would agree - but who's saying it. Weerasuriya isn't some idle spectator or Sony-hating third party, he's the co-founder of one of the only studios to really shine on the platform, and the developers of perhaps its finest games, the two portable God of War titles.
To hear him speaking like that...well, it reads like a eulogy. Words in memory of a system that's already been wound up. Now, why would that be?
PSP 'was doomed from the start' - God of War dev [EDGE, via CVG]