Casio did make at least one smart phone around 2014. It was ruggedized and waterproof. Not very powerful and the operating system was out of date the day it came out, but I remember it fondly. It was great for fieldwork, since I didn't have to worry if it got wet slogging through streams or busted against riprap on the way up the bank.
Japanese property bubble was the late Eighties. Stock market tanked in 1990, real estate followed in 1991. Most of the Eighties I heard "The Japanese are taking over America. They're winning an economic war."
Not that in particular, it's Japan turning from an easy going, and simple society into a polar opposite, obsessed with profit, and stimulation like some worst gambling addicts
It was. The post-war conditions, with the cooperation of American occupying forces, made Japan scramble to reinvent itself from a militaristic industrial power(from the Meiji period until 1945) into a consumer corporate economy with strong export businesses, and it did so in a top-down collective fashion - which has made external observers remark things to the effect of "it seems like Japan is stuck in the 1950's", since the model remained in place, everything in lock-step, for decades. This can be studied through the history of the major companies that emerged from that period like the auto manufacturers(Toyota, Honda) and electronics companies(Casio, Philips, Sony, Roland and more). This culture is also reflected in more detail through prominent figures in the boom generation that came of age in the 70s, e.g. Hayao Miyazaki(animation) and Shigeru Miyamoto(games) - both extremely driven, fastidious types.
The model worked and created the "economic miracle", but it also set the stage for an enormous property bubble in the 80s. I recommend reading "Japan, inc." to get a sense of the bubble period in the form of a manga focused on finance and economics. Ever since the bubble burst, Japan could be described as "unmotivated" - a combination of being chained to the structure of existing institutions and seeing demographic declines set in earlier than other nations. While the country is still known for a fastidious corporate culture, the demographics are catching up with it now and suggest what things will look like in countries facing population decline going forward.
I've never seen this before, and it's fantastic! A games console with a printer??
It printed stickers. The idea that you could play a game and end up with something tangible, that you could then exhibit or share with friends, is just groundbreaking. Even as a niche product, it should have been a huge success!
What went wrong? It was marketed at girls, and maybe girls weren't enough into gaming at the time...? Or maybe the games didn't take full advantage of the hardware? Or maybe the marketing wasn't good enough? What a pity...
This is fascinating. I was one of the biggest collectors of video games in the late 90s and early 2000s. I would have shit like the 64DD shipped overnight on day of release.
But I never even heard of the Casio Loopy until today.
Yeah but it was always just an add on, and it's hard to design games for an accessory that maybe 10% of players will have - it's just not worth the effort. If you know that 100% of your userbase will own something, then it can become the core of your experience and design.
In similar vein, Microsoft killed Kinect when they announced that it will no longer be bundled with the Xbox One - suddenly it went from a "must" in terms of integration, to an optional feature that was nearly always cut from any project, since you couldn't guarantee the player would even have it.
I love the writing flourish of having an introductory paragraph that follows the common stylistic form of making some kind of broad point that the following paragraphs will flesh out, only to pull the rug out and cheerfully admit it was just a bunch of rambling with no connection to the rest of the text.
I thought it was a direct bit or foreshadowing for the later paragraph:
>Which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. I am not a preteen Japanese girl. As a child, I wasn’t really into stickers as their impermanence bothered me. So I’m not sure I can judge this console fairly…
>I think had Nintendo somehow ended up in a Philips-like deal with Casio, a port of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe to the Loopy may have been a success. Someone get on that.
1995 was just after Nintendo got burned twice by the Sony and Philips CD-drive deals. The likelihood of them doing another partnership like that with Casio would have been in "when hell freezes over" territory.
I consider Casio one of the few under-exposed brands in the world. You could credibly taken them into several other adjacent product areas than the ones they currently occupy.
I wish Casio made earbuds. I doubt they'd have the best sound and they probably wouldn't be very comfortable (no different from the competition) and they surely would be no sartorial revelation.
But they would last forever and they would actually work reliably. I'd buy a pair, happily.
Rachel Weil, who started the FEMICOM Museum to highlight "girls games", has done extensive research on the Loopy. There's a good overview of her work on this recent episode of the Video Game History Hour podcast: https://gamehistory.org/ep-58-femicom-museum/. She has done a lot of work placing these games in context and defending their importance. Some of these sold in huge numbers but have basically no coverage in the traditional retro gaming spaces.
Unfortunately, the FEMICOM Museum website seems to be down right now (http://femicom.org/).
> Even the high score concept is foreign to a man who doesn’t know about the modern arabic numerals
I used to work for an Arab guy back in the day. He wasn't very familiar with Roman numerals but what we call Arabic numerals, he calls Indian numerals.
On topic: thanks, I didn't know about this console. I do remember (fondly) their tiny handhelds, though
TIL Europeans called them "Arabic" numerals because they were in use in parts of the Arab world and popularized by a Persian mathematician (who called them "Hindu numerals")
I also wasn't aware that they are a relatively recent invention from somewhere between 1st-4th century.
Yeah, I found that fascinating too when I first found out about it: the Arabs invented the concept of decimal numbers, but the characters they use are mostly completely different: 0 is just a dot, 1 is a more or less vertical line, the only number instantly recognizable is the 9 (https://www.lexisrex.com/Arabic-Numbers/1-100)
No, the Arabs didn't invent it. al-Khwarzimi, a Persian scholar, introduced it into the Arab world with his book: "On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals" around 820 CE.
The Hindu Bakhshali manuscript carbon-dated to between 200-400 CE, uses the "shunya" or zero symbol both as a placeholder in the decimal place-value system, and as a numeral involved in computations.
I can definitely see how 4 could become our version, especially if it needed to be written in a way that distinguishes it from epsilon as it spread into Europe.
The Hitachi (now Renesas) SuperH family was pretty good for its time. A project I worked on the mid to late 90s used one and it was great to develop for. Even the assembler code was understandable for someone like me coming from a Motorola 68000 background.
Nowadays everything is just a smartphone or tablet from 2 or 3 relevant manufacturers. Boring.
Sony is a shadow of it’s former self even though PlayStation is a success, and Casio is tiny and only focuses on niches (watches, instruments).