Loopy is a blog about deep-cut games, obscure consoles, and the interesting corners of game history. It leans towards Japan, because that's where most of the good untold stories are, and it's written from New Zealand, which means a lifetime of PAL releases, 50Hz borders, and games that arrived a year late or not at all. That turns out to be a useful vantage point — some things we missed, and a few glorious things only we got.
I'm Ben. I've been playing games since I was six, which is now a genuinely alarming number of years, and the ones that stuck with me were never the ones on the magazine covers. Each article here is one game or one machine given a proper look: what it is, why it slipped through the cracks, why it's worth caring about, and how you can actually play it today.
Half the reason Loopy exists is that I want to learn these games properly, not just remember them. Revisiting them now, from a completely different technological age, is a strange privilege — the whole history is searchable, the interviews are archived, and a machine that owned the living room in 1995 fits in a pocket. The old tech inspires me as much as the games do. Design under constraint, every byte argued over. We don't really make things that way anymore.
Also, and I want to be honest about this, the blog is a formal excuse to dive into old hardware and buy fun things. My defence is that it's research.
How it's made
Articles are researched and drafted with AI assistance and edited by a human — me. Every date, price, and publisher credit is checked against at least two independent sources before publishing, and anything that can't be verified gets flagged rather than fudged. All screenshots are my own captures. The opinions, and any mistakes that survive, are mine.
Say hello
The best way to follow along is the RSS feed. If you've spotted a mistake, know something about one of these games that I don't, or want to point me at an obscurity worth covering — I want to hear it.