THE LOOPY LINE-UP
anime Land released: 1995
This simple illustration program allows you to create scenes with anime characters, food, flowers and other objects, and then print them out as stickers to place anywhere. It was bundled along with the machine at launch and developed internally within Casio.
pc COLLECTION released: 1996
This collection of ten applications was bundled with the Loopy Mouse but also available separately. The applications included a word processor, horoscope, music composer and, naturally, drawing software.
BOWWOW puppy Love STORY released: 1995
According to sales head Hidekazu Tanaka, this was the Loopy’s bestselling game. The script was written by Kenji Terada of Final Fantasy fame, and the story sees a girl called Momo and her dog Baku adventuring through a land of sentient fruits and vegetables.
LITTLE Romance released: 1996
This is a comic-creation program in which you can fill in the text in speech bubbles and match them with precreated characters, or design your own characters from scratch. And then, naturally, print out the resulting comic.
hari hari Seal paradise released: 1995
Another piece of illustration software for the Loopy, HARI HARI Seal Paradise enables you to create name stickers and small pictures using a variety of backgrounds and fonts, and was, again, developed internally by the development team at Casio.
Lupiton’s Wonder palette released: 1996
Yet another illustration program, this was one of the handful of Loopy titles that wasn’t developed internally by Casio, instead coming from Axes Art Amuse, the studio behind Clockwerx on the SNES and Saturn.
dream Change: Kokin-chan’s Fashion party released: 1995
The Loopy’s second bestselling game according to Tanaka, Dream Change saw players take control of a girl who aims to be a top model. Players can dress her and print stickers of her outfits. It was developed by Alfa System.
CARICATURE ARTIST released: 1995
Tanaka recalls that this is the Loopy’s third bestselling game, and it’s yet another illustration program, this time one that lets users create caricatures and then print them out as stickers. Can you spot a theme emerging here?
Chakrakun’s Charm paradise released: 1997
Developed by Armat, this is the Loopy’s final game release, and the rarest to find out in the wild today. It stars Chakra-kun, a mischievous cat from a contemporary manga by Joju Sayuri, and is based around fortune-telling.
I Want a Room In Loopy Town! released: 1996
Like all of the Loopy games released from 1996 onwards, I Want A Room In Loopy Town is compatible with the Loopy Mouse, released in the same year. The game was created with input from Kenji Terada, and sees players designing a room.
6,000 or 7,000 yen. (For comparison, the Sony Playstation launched a year earlier at an RRP of 39,800 yen.) Tanaka says that the initial reaction from the press was positive: “As Casio was considered a leader in the electronics toy industry, the media response was like, ‘Oh, the next big thing is the sticker.’ They praised us for having a good eye.” Matsubara also recalls that the response from users was “very favourable”. He and Matsubara were called in to help the sales team during the Christmas 1995 shopping season, and he remembers standing in toy stores, demonstrating Loopy consoles. “The Loopy was a magnet for children,” he recalls. “Kids wanting their own stickers made large queues at the stores. They had to tell the kids ‘one sticker each’ because the line was so long. But kids would go back to join the end of the queue after receiving a sticker.”
But despite the queues, the Loopy remained stubbornly stuck to shop shelves. “Because the sales during the Christmas shopping did not meet management’s expectations,” says Matsubara, “the Loopy was judged a failure within three months of the launch.” A press release from 1995 estimated that the first year’s production would be 200,000 units, although no one at Casio has firm figures on how many consoles were actually made or sold. But as Frazer points out, the fact that it’s relatively easy to find new, sealed Loopy consoles even now indicates that many didn’t make it into customers’ homes. Likewise, it’s unclear exactly when production ended, although a mouse peripheral and four more games were launched in 1996, with the final game, Chakra-kun’s Charm Paradise, coming out in 1997.
And that signalled the end of Casio’s ambitions in the games business. When asked whether the company had any plans to do a follow up to the Loopy, Hayashi and Matsubara burst into laughter – the machine was very much a one-off that didn’t work out. That said, it has a certain cult following: Matsubara remembers that a US college student came to Japan to interview him about the Loopy around five years ago, and he gave her some of his old Loopy games.
In one sense, the failure of the Loopy is surprising given the fascination of Japan’s youth with stickers. In July 1995, Atlus launched the first ‘Purikura’ machine (short for Purinto Kurubu, or Print
Club). Several months later, after one of the machines was featured on a TV show hosted by the popular boy band SMAP, Purikura exploded in popularity, with whole ranks of machines filling Japanese arcades.
The Loopy could technically replicate the experience of a Purikura machine at home. A peripheral called Magical Shop allowed the console to be connected to a VCR or camcorder, then users could annotate the images and print them out as stickers. But this was fiddly and expensive – Magical Shop cost 14,800 yen. Plus, whereas Purikura was a social experience, with groups of friends excitedly cramming into booths together, Loopy was very much a solo affair, owing to its single controller port. Matsubara says that were “several reasons” why the Loopy didn’t have a second controller port. “Among them, player versus player games were not planned for the Loopy; it was a creation-focused game console, so we thought one controller was enough.” He also notes that cost considerations were an issue.
Frazer thinks that the lack of multiplayer is one reason why the Loopy didn’t take off. “They didn’t design it with any ability to be sociable,” he says, “which is at odds with what those sticker machines were doing in the arcades.” And he notes Casio missed a trick by not including a digital camera in the console, which could’ve allowed users to print stickers of themselves or put their likeness into games. “Casio were producing that sort of stuff, they did make digital cameras – it wouldn’t have been difficult to pair that sort of stuff up.”
Ultimately, however, despite the Loopy’s shortcomings, Frazer has a soft spot for the oddball console. “At that time, these companies were just prepared to go for it and try out weird and wonderful stuff,” he recalls. “Nowadays it’s a threehorse race with modern consoles – there just isn’t that diversity and wackiness.”
player versus player games were not planned for the Loopy; it was a creation-focused game console Kunihiro Matsubara