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A Nintendo press conference introduced Chinatown Wars to the world. The game was designed from the ground up to reflect the DS's hardware strengths and weaknesses. It went on to become the best-reviewed DS game of all time.
This wasn't enough to drive the kind of sales expected from the Grand Theft Auto name, though. In its first ten weeks on sale in Europe and the US, Chinatown Wars managed to move 670,000 copies. Contrast this with 5.78 million copies of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and 3.47 million copies of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories on PSP.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Rockstar just announced a PSP port of Chinatown Wars for this fall. The game will be available in UMD and DDL form on October 20 in the US while Europe gets it October 23.
In a lot of ways this port marks the PSP's first significant victory in the portable system wars (such as they are). Chinatown Wars on PSP is probably going to sell at least a million copies, easily, and could conceivably outsell its DS original by an order of magnitude if Sony's plans to revitalize the PSP take off this fall.
Rockstar would be foolish to make another DS GTA title after Chinatown Wars failed to sell. You could argue that any developer who even pitched an M-rated title for DS at this point was being foolish. There's no an entire range of games that will probably no longer be produced for DS but will be available on PSP.
The question here is what, if anything, Nintendo is going to do about it. On Wii the company has been happy to cede the market for core and M-rated games to 360 and PS3. With Chinatown Wars, Sony's making inroads into an area where Nintendo's strength has previously been unassailable. No portable competitor has ever before gotten a significant edge over whatever portable system Nintendo was pushing at the time.
If Nintendo cedes the entire range of M-rated, core-friendly titles to PSP, then they're practically handing Sony an edge that could become very valuable if gamers warm to the PSP Go. The PSP has already outlived every previous portable system that attempted to challenge the Game Boy line. Nintendo could have a real fight for portable dominance on their hands in 2010 and I'm not sure it's a fight the company would know how to win.
