![]() The bulk of them were ports or re-releases of other developers’ games like Borderlands 2 and The Walking Dead, and the company stopped making Vita games itself in 2015. Of the more than 1,400 games playable on Vita, Sony itself only published a few dozen. The handheld never became the sales driver the PSP was for Sony – the company sold over 80 million of those compared to roughly 15 million Vitas – nor did it become the second home for tentpole blockbuster games like Killzone that it was supposed to provide with its beefy graphics processor. Those corporate goals also sank the Vita. How else will people know it’s a luxurious style piece unless it’s monumentally expensive for no reason? This is the kind of industrial design decision-making that nearly sank the company in the ’00s as it was desperate to keep its stranglehold on both consumer electronics and lucrative format licensing like the compact disc, which it co-owned with Panasonic. All this hotness comes in at just $250 too.” Of course it uses a proprietary memory format in an era when we’ll rely on digital distribution to sell the bulk of our games, and in a decade when SD cards are finally cheap. “See this OLED screen? It’s got the inkiest blacks, kids. “Every other piece of tech has a multi-touch screen in the ’10s? Well ours has a touchscreen on the back! And, like, all the cameras all over” for alternate reality games and taking pictures that don’t look as good as the ones on your phone. Even now at the end of its life, every last feature of Sony’s least-favorite child feels like a labored mix of Cool Dad posturing and corporate skullduggery. ![]() As a machine, Vita reeks of classic Sony hubris. This was in spite of the hardware itself. As with storied hardware failures like Dreamcast and Gamecube, PS Vita was a paradise for beautiful, unusual games seemingly custom built for the people who sought them out with the greatest fervor. Instead it became a fertile ecosystem for undomesticated experiments like the aforementioned Mutant Blobs. It was supposed to be a breeding ground for new Uncharteds untethered from televisions – grand realization of the second-screen market that entertainment businesses were trying to cultivate at the beginning of the ’00s. ![]() The world expected Vita to succeed on the same playing field as its predecessor and Sony’s home consoles, as a showcase for technologically advanced video games with Hollywood gloss. As Vita fades even further into obscurity, though, it’s remarkable how my first experiences with it signified its greatest strengths. Sony itself hasn’t said the dream is dead, but Koji Igarashi’s announcement that the Vita version of Bloodstained was cancelled because the platform is being discontinued, coupled with the announcement that cartridge manufacturing will stop in 2019, is a clear sign that the end is nigh. Sony is ending production of the little portable that couldn’t. By the time I played Mutant Blobs Attack a week later, we were in love. We met on release day at a Walmart in Colorado, awkwardly getting to know each other over some Hot Shots Golf. Vita, an oblong chimera of trendy tech features, needed someone to believe it could deliver something beyond half-step versions of big budget PlayStation games like Uncharted. Nintendo 3DS’ disastrous first year, and half a decade of infrequent, lackluster PSP games made me leery of yet another stab at high-end portable gaming. There we were: at the beginning of 2012, afraid to love again. PlayStation Vita and I found each other at a vulnerable moment.
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