![]() ![]() At the end of the animation, the CASIO outline is filled white and pauses briefly before fading to launch one of the eleven published games released during the Loopy’s time on the market.Īlthough the Loopy was supported for only just over three years, its legacy as a console marketed explicitly to women in Japan has managed to survive well into our contemporary moment. Booting the console cues a fade-to-blue screen with an outlined CASIO dithering in on a curve from the left and right edges of the television to a brief musical jingle. Alongside this terminal is a button that causes a small blade to slide across the inside of the printer’s mouth to cut stickers that the console has printed. Inserting sticker paper into the terminal requires releasing the lid by pressing the Open button, which causes it to entirely slide off the console and expose three mounts for aligning the sticker-paper cartridge. This terminal is covered with a clear plastic window to check the remaining amount of sticker paper. These take up approximately half of the console while the other half is reserved exclusively for the sticker-paper cartridge terminal. The power switch and cartridge eject and reset buttons can be found on top of the console just below the game-cartridge slot. On the back of the console there are A/V and power ports as well as a small knob labeled Contrast with five settings for adjustments to the printer. Its four-inch height accommodates both a single controller port centered on the front of the console and the offset “Seal Out” printer mouth. ![]() ![]() At three and a half pounds and a foot long (roughly the length of a model 1 Sega Genesis console), the hardware features several variations on a typical video game console build. On the back of the console box, players can find screenshots from various Loopy game software with accompanying descriptions that focus on introducing the games’ stories to curious players. The console tagline, roughly translated as “the games are fun, the stickers are great,” and bullets emphasizing the kinds of enjoyment players will experience with the console as well as its 32-bit CPU border these images. An artist’s rendition of the kinds of stickers that players might print hovers above the console in an eye-catching yellow oval. On the front of the box, the Loopy is pictured at a slight angle to capture the console’s various hardware features as well as a fresh sticker emerging from the printer terminal’s mouth. The console comes housed in a white and pink cardboard box, adorned with an abundance of bubbly pastel hearts and the trademark pink and blue interlinked heart logo. (Image courtesy of Quang Nguyen, in Lewis Packwood, “In the Loopy: The Story of Casio’s Crazy 90s Console, Eurogamer, July 15, 2018, ) Equally unique is that Casio marketed the Loopy explicitly to women in Japan through gendered visual, procedural, and performative rhetorics. Largely forgotten by dominant narratives of game history, the Japan-only console came uniquely equipped with a built-in thermal printer that would print color stickers and text on a ream of paper stored inside the console. Predating both Nintendo’s experiments with consolized Purikura and the general rise of Purikura across Japan was a play on printers and paper in video games-a “strictly solo affair” with sticker paper to spare 1: the 1995 Casio Loopy (fig. This form of print play emphasizes public, irreverent, and communal uses similar to and inspired by the Japanese sticker phenomenon of Print Club, or Purikura, photo booths. With the appearance of paper printing devices such as Nintendo’s Game Boy Printer and Pokémon Snap printing station, however, paper unfurled as a form of playing with printing itself. From in-game representations of paper and printing tools as interface, to paratextual materials like strategy guides and feelies, printed materials facilitated playing video games. In video games, paper functions as an integral media for play. Through technology and as technology, paper loops, temporarily creating a noticeable protrusion from its intertwining with other technologies before it flattens back into the operating logics of the technological systems enfolding it. It bends, winds, and curls, traversing through toner roll and drum until it curves out of the feed, twisting and tumbling onto and off of the tray. ![]()
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