Casio · 1995–1998 · Unknown (Japan-only; commercial failure)
A 32-bit Japanese console from 1995 marketed specifically to girls, whose defining feature was not its games but a built-in colour thermal printer for turning screenshots into stickers.
The Casio Loopy, subtitled "My Seal Computer SV-100," was released only in Japan in October 1995 at ¥25,000, and it is one of the few consoles in history designed and marketed explicitly for a female audience. Its defining feature was not processing power or a killer game but a peripheral: a built-in full-colour thermal printer that let players generate adhesive stickers — "seals," in Japanese — from in-game screenshots or custom designs. The console was, in effect, a sticker-making machine that also played games. Technically it was more capable than its toy-like positioning suggested. It ran a Hitachi SH7021 SuperH 32-bit RISC CPU at 16 MHz, with 1 MB of RAM and 2 MB of ROM, could display 512 colours, and played four channels of 12-bit PCM audio. An optional accessory, the Magical Shop, was a video-capture device that pulled still images from a VCR or other video source so they too could be captioned and printed as stickers, extending the machine's core novelty beyond its own games. The eleven-title library was tightly themed around the console's intended audience: dress-up and makeover games, painting and drawing tools, romance stories, and sticker-creation software, with titles like Dream Change: Kokin-chan's Fashion Party, Lupiton's Wonder Palette, and HARIHARI Seal Paradise. None were the kind of showcase that moves hardware to a broad market, and the entire concept was built around the printer novelty rather than around games that could stand on their own. The Loopy did not succeed. Casio ended software development in November 1996, barely a year after launch, and ceased producing the console at the end of 1998. It is remembered today as one of gaming's most distinctive curiosities — a deliberate attempt to reach an audience the industry almost entirely ignored, built around a genuinely unusual hardware gimmick, that nonetheless could not find a market. Its rarity and oddity have since made it a cult collector's item, and it recently drew fresh attention when hobbyists managed to port Doom to run on it, a wry epilogue for a console built to make stickers.