Drake paid $20,000 for this ugly PSP

Golden console was previously owned by Pharrell Williams
Drake paid $20,000 for this ugly PSP
Drake paid $20,000 for this ugly PSP /

James Bond may be The Man with the Golden Gun, but it turns out that Drake is the man with the golden PSP. A very shiny handheld console was recently spotted in a music video for the rapper’s song “Jumbotron Shit Poppin” (thanks, Kotaku) – that’s the official title, I swear.

Gaining 1.7 million views on YouTube since its release two days ago, the video has certainly made an impression on a great many eyeballs. Among all the usual bling shown in the footage is one particularly interesting object: a golden PSP. It’s visible right at the beginning, again at 0:52, and once more at 1:28.

The PlayStation Portable was released in 2004 in Japan and in 2005 in the rest of the world as the first-ever handheld PlayStation console. Selling over 80 million units over ten years before being replaced by the PlayStation Vita, the experiment was a success for Sony. Among its many fans and buyers at the time was none other than musician and 13-time Grammy Award winner Pharrell Williams.

Williams was not quite happy with a mere standard edition of the PSP, however. In 2008, he had a 14-karat gold casing made for his handheld console, which replaced the usual plastic shell around all the tech. Since this made the PSP a bit too heavy to just carry around in his pockets – it weighs just about 660 grams – Williams also commissioned a custom Goyard carrying case for it.

His love for the golden PSP did not last forever, though, as it was sold off at auction in 2022 together with a boatload of other items Williams no longer had any desire to possess.

Here’s where Drake comes in. Apparently the rapper really digs Williams’ taste from over a decade ago, so he spent a couple grand to buy up the offerings, including that very tacky PSP, which cost him $19,375 according to the listing.

While the Goyard case was included in the auction, Williams apparently did not put up his games to be sold, so Drake just bought an ugly PSP and can’t even play anything on it. No wonder he’s cluelessly flailing about with it in that music video, saying confused things like “Jumbotron Shit Poppin”.


Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg