Yu-Gi-Oh!

The card game was one chapter. Kazuki Takahashi drew it in 1996 as a single episode among the many games his characters played, readers demanded more of it, and the manga reorganised itself around a product that did not exist yet. More than 35 billion of those cards have since been printed.

A manga about bullying, with a different game every week

Takahashi started the series in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1996. A shy boy solves an Egyptian puzzle, acquires a second personality and punishes bullies through games: dice, arcade cabinets, chess, anything at hand.

Magic and Wizards, the card duel, appeared once. The response was large enough that Takahashi brought it back, and it took the series over within a year.

Konami published the real cards in 1999, three years after the fictional ones. The rules had to be invented backwards from a comic that had never worried about balance, and the early game was unplayable enough that Konami rewrote it twice in three years.

Every sequel changes the format of the duel itself

Yu-Gi-Oh! GX moved to a school in 2004 and made card duelling an academic subject. Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds put the duels on motorcycles in 2008, at speed, with rules that reward turning corners.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal added a mechanic in 2011 that Konami launched in the physical game the same year. The series has functioned as a rules bulletin for two decades.

Each new show introduces a summoning method that the shops start selling within months: fusion, synchro, experience, link. The fiction doubles as a release schedule.

The most printed card game in history, and a manga few finish

The trading card game has outsold every competitor, including Magic and Pokemon. Guinness recorded 25.2 billion cards sold in 2011 and the count passed 35 billion a decade later. Its tournament circuit runs in more than sixty countries.

The manga itself ends in 2004 with a plot about ancient Egypt that a large share of the audience has never read, having arrived through the anime or the cards.

This is a franchise where most participants engage with the product rather than the story, and where the story exists to keep introducing products.

Takahashi died rescuing strangers

In July 2022, Takahashi was found dead in the sea off Okinawa. He had gone in to help a family caught in a current, wearing snorkelling gear. The child and one adult survived.

The United States Army awarded him a posthumous commendation, having established that an off-duty officer he assisted was among those he reached.

His obituaries led with the card sales, which were the largest number available. The circumstances of his death say more about him than the figures do.