Collector’s Corner

Meet the collector that’s obsessed with all things Loopy

Frazer Rhodes (@frazer_hx) bought his first Casio Loopy around eight years ago, when a collector he knew brought around ten new, sealed consoles back from Japan. He paid just £65 for the machine, but interest in the unique Japanese console spiked a few years later, and he ended up selling it to a museum in Italy for £375.

Since then, he says, prices have come down a little as people have got greater access to Japanese trading sites like Yahoo Japan. Boxed consoles occasionally come up for sale on ebay for prices between £100 and £225, but the Loopy is more common on Japanese websites.

Frazer says that he paid between £20 and £25 for most of his Loopy games on Yahoo Japan, plus shipping and fees. But he is still hunting for the Loopy’s rarest game, Chakra-kun’s Charm Paradise, which was released right at the end of the console’s lifetime in 1997. “I just haven’t seen that come up for sale. I suspect there’s probably a few other collectors who are looking out for that game, so it could get interesting if that ever comes up.”

He notes that the games tend to be “much of a muchness”, an assortment of sticker-creation software and simple adventure games, but that the Magical Shop, which allows the Loopy to be connected to a VCR or camcorder, is “probably the best thing about the Loopy, from a techie perspective”. The peripheral goes for £70-£95 on ebay.

However, he says, the hardest bit about collecting for the Loopy is “actually getting hold of the tape to print stickers”. As a consumable item, the sticker tape is becoming ever rarer as the years go by. “If everybody prints the stickers,” notes Frazer, “there’ll be no more tape left.” He recently managed to buy one new sticker cartridge for around £17 including postage – but that was a considerable mark-up on the tape’s initial selling price:

“The sticker on the box said it originally cost 98 yen!”