The bizarre story of the Casio Loopy console

The Casio Loopy. All Loopy photos courtesy of Quang Nguyen.

I first heard about the Casio Loopy from Chris Bowman at Console Connections in Shildon – I wrote about his amazing indie shop in a previous article for Eurogamer. Chris is a keen retro game collector, and I was fascinated when he told me about an obscure Japan-only console that had a built-in sticker printer.

With his help, I tracked down a collector who owned one, and I also interviewed Octav1us, a YouTuber who has produced a video all about the console. I spoke to her while she was filming Digitiser: The Show, the magnum opus of one Paul Rose, aka Mr Biffo off Teletext in the nineties. She says it’s been a suitably surreal experience. “The set looks awesome, it’s very weird. He’s got a dead heron and there’s a dead stoat, and there’s this horrific taxidermy, we don’t know what it is, it’s like a cat or a weasel but half of its face is caved in and it’s just sat there behind the desk. It’s a terrifying glimpse into Mr Biffo’s mind.”

Best of all, I managed to get in touch with a couple of Casio engineers who had worked on the console back in the 90s. And they were also able to give info on how long the Casio Loopy was in production for – as far as I know, this is the first time anyone has had a definite answer to this question. In fact, there’s not a lot of information on the machine, full stop – which is partly why it’s so interesting to collectors.