To work in the computer games business in the mid-1990s was to have a grandstand seat at a pivotal moment. 32-bit gaming was the order of the day and 3D acceleration was making its first appearance in high-end PC graphics cards, so perhaps the fastest changes ever seen in gaming happened across a few short years. It’s a shock then after spending that decade on the cutting edge, to find a ’90s console we’d never heard of from a major manufacturer. The Casio Loopy was a Japan-only machine which targeted a female gaming demographic, and featured a built-in sticker printer as its unique selling point.

On the face of it the Loopy was up there with the competition, featuring a similar 32-bit SuperH processor to the Sega Saturn paired with a megabyte of RAM, but staying with cartridges as the rest of the industry moved towards CDs led to its games being space-limited and expensive. At the same time the original PlayStation was winning developers from the cartridge model with a lower-cost barrier to entry, so the Loopy failed to capture a market and was off sale by 1996. We can see that its graphics may have been a little dated for the 32-bit era and that sticker printer would have driven parents crazy with requests for expensive cartridges, but we can’t help wishing it had made it out of Japan like their portable computers did.

Thanks [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Header: Incog88, CC BY-SA 3.0.