The Strange Story Of The Casio Loopy
The Loopy was an odd beast: a 32-bit console that was marketed exclusively to girls and housed a built-in sticker printer. here, its creators tell the story behind Casio’s abortive foray into the world of videogaming
Lewis Packwood speaks to the developers behind Casio’s odd console
The Nineties saw a flood of oddball consoles emerging from Japan, like the Sega Wondermega and Bandai Playdia. But perhaps the strangest was the Casio Loopy, an unlikely cross between a console and a sticker-making machine. It flopped at retail and was never released outside Japan, but in recent years it has been commanding high prices among collectors in the UK and elsewhere, who prize it for its uniqueness.
One such collector is Frazer Rhodes, whose pristine, complete Neo-geo AES collection can be seen in the pages of Bitmap Books’ Neo-geo: A Visual History. Although his primary passion is SNK’S machine, he has a soft spot for all Japanese consoles from that period – particularly the strange ones.
“I’ve always been a supporter of the underdog – the oddballs, the outsiders,” he says. “Back in the early Nineties, things were coming out of Japan just left, right and centre, it was a really exciting time. You’d just get this stream of new consoles, new ideas – so every time you bought CVG or Mean Machines there would always be a section on the latest things from Japan. And I guess the more weird and wonderful it was, the more I was interested in it.”
And the Loopy certainly was weird and wonderful, marking the result of an internal push for innovative products at Casio. Tetsuya Hayashi and Kunihiro Matsubara were working in the company’s musical instruments department in the early Nineties when
they were instructed by management to “come up with a product that will become a new business for Casio”. Four other teams were given the same command, kickstarting projects that eventually became the
QV-10 camera (the first consumer LCD digital camera) and the Tele LT-70 videophone. But Hayashi and Matsubara’s team went down a very different route.
“During the early discussion period, the team was thinking about products for education,” recalls Matsubara. “But since Casio’s personal digital assistants for children, such as the JD-300 launched in 1992, were commercially successful, and game consoles in general were very popular all over the world, we picked a game console. To differentiate, we combined it with Casio’s printing technology for label printers.”
Hidekazu Tanaka was in charge of Casio’s sales promotion for electronic toys at the time, and he recalls thinking that the incorporation of stickers was a good idea. “Casio had a line-up of electronic toy
products,” he remembers, “including electronic organisers for children, children’s label printers capable of printing portrait stickers, and children’s word processors. As such, the electronic toy market was booming at that time. Of course, game consoles like the Super Famicom were popular, too, and stickers are always popular with children. I thought it was interesting to combine games and stickers.
“On the other hand,” he says, “I wondered: ‘Are we really serious about the game business? Is it gonna work?’ Casio was good at one-shot products,
but the game market is a different creature as it requires users to buy game software one after another. I was anxious about how many game titles we can create with the end outcome being a sticker.”
The idea of incorporating stickers only came later on in development, recalls Matsubara. “Casio was also making LCD screens at that time, so at one stage there was an idea to make a portable game console. But instead, we wanted to create something that had not existed in the world yet, so we thought about using the technology Casio had, and the sticker printer was added to the game console.”
Casio was good at one-shot products, but the game market is a different creature as it requires users to buy game software one after another hidekazu Tanaka
Casio had a small amount of previous experience in the games market. In 1983, the company simultaneously launched the Z80-processor-based Casio PV-1000 and PV-2000 consoles, but they quickly sank without trace. And Casio’s 1990 Super Picky Talk electronic organiser also allowed users to take care of virtual dogs, fore-running the Tamagotchi craze. But to all intents and purposes, Casio was new to the games industry – which caused headaches for the Loopy development team.
“Since the team members were developers of electronic musical instruments, we had no knowledge of graphics,” says Matsubara. “So we asked Yoyogi Animation Academy [the oldest animation studio in Japan] to help us and supervise the game characters. Only the background music pieces playing in the games (you can choose from variety of music) were our own field of expertise. At the beginning, the game software was almost all made in-house. But later we needed to increase the number of game titles, so we relied on outsourcing.”
Another quirk of the Casio Loopy was that it was marketed solely to girls. This wasn’t the intention at the very start of development, according to
Matsubara, but female employees at Casio liked the idea of making stickers, “and that unexpected usage of the game console seemed to catch the management’s attention. There were already a lot of games for boys, so it was different and interesting for the management, and the path to target girls was set.” Tanaka notes that Casio’s ‘sticker word processor’ was already very popular with young girls – but it could only produce black and white stickers, whereas the Loopy could print in full colour.
When it came to the Loopy’s games, the team wanted to do something a bit different. “There were lots of games for boys already,” says Matsubara, “but most of them were about sports, racing, shooting, and games like Super Mario where the game ends when you clear all stages.” To target the female market, the team decided to focus on more openended games that encouraged creativity – but they faced internal opposition regarding the move away from more conventional game genres. “Even Casio’s sales people were like, ‘Every game is like that. Why do you want to change that?’” recalls Matsubara, “But we wanted to change that. Instead of the player being passive, we wanted to create a game where players can be more creative.”
The resulting games were certainly different, although very simplistic. Of the five games released at launch – Anime Land, Bow-wow Puppy Love Story, Dream Change, HARI HARI Seal Paradise and Caricature Artist – almost all were essentially tools for creating montages or drawing pictures that could be made into stickers. Bow-wow Puppy Love Story (aka Wan-wan Aijou Monogatari) stood out as the only real ‘proper’ game among the launch titles, an adventure title in which the player controls a girl called Momo and her pet puppy Baku. The script for the game was written by Kenji Terada, scenario writer for the first three Final Fantasy games, and Terada even made an appearance at the Loopy’s press launch event, which was held in a hotel near Casio’s HQ.
The Loopy – also known as the My Seal Computer SV-100, with ‘seal’ being the Japanese term for sticker – launched in October 1995 at an RRP of 25,000 yen, with games costing
The team members were developers of electronic musical instruments, we had no knowledge of graphics Kunihiro Matsubara