The Casio Loopy was released in Japan in October 1995 with one market in mind: female gamers. This was due to the enthusiasm of the women who developed the device with the top that “girls, an underserved consumer in the gaming space of the day, would also enjoy the product“.
The console was part of the 32-bit era but wasn’t really there to compete with the SNES or Mega Drive. It could display 512-color graphics, play 12-bit PCM audio through 4 channels, and had just one controller port for a controller or mouse. The unique selling point of the Loopy was its built-in thermal color printer and you could print out stickers of game screenshots with it. But there was more as you could buy a special accessory called Magical Shop, which was a video capture device, and print images from video tape players and DVD players.
Casio stopped making the Loopy games in November 1996 and the console as a whole in December 1998. But apparently, there is MAME emulator support and a ROM set for it if you really want to try it out.
Thanks to Hackaday for putting this unique piece of video gaming history on my radar.
Update: there’s now a Loopy flash cart! (via Time Extension)
