Chapter Text
From the desk of Wayne R. Slifer, November 7th, 2036.
Had I been told in my youth that a Children's Trading Card Game would change the entire world for both better and worst, I would have wondered if they had smoked a bowl of weed as high as the Empire State Building and somehow survived the endeavor. Much stranger than that has happened in the creation of Duel Monsters.
I know I’m an outsider to things in Japan, but I’m not one in the card game world. I’m normally the kind of guy who reports on the mundane goings on of Magic: the Gathering tournaments and more commonly than that the professional poker beat for the Card Games World tournament circuits column.
But what I have for you now is somehow the nexus of all those things, and yet a microcosm that would make your more self-righteous muckrakers jump for joy. And this was also the sort of thing that would make your average financially-illiterate news reader’s eyes glaze over. When I first started covering the MtG scene, I had only a small idea about the efforts to translate the game internationally. Leagues popped up in Europe and China, but Japan...Japan had never been a good breeding ground for that sort of thing.
At first, the common narrative was simply that things were strange over there. The land of Pokemon, superior cars, and really weird porn, just didn’t have the kind of community that would be into collectible card games.
That was the thinking until I found out about Duel Monsters in the summer of 1999.
Duel Monsters is an enterprise designed as a pyramid scheme. I say this because of its inventor, an eccentric billionaire, Pegasus Crawford, who claims to have based the game off of rules he found from a card game in Egypt, is the kind of man who would give anybody weird goosebumps the moment he looks at you. I don’t mean the kind of weird goosebumps you get when you see a guy who still wears cravats without a hint of irony, but the kind you get when you meet someone who hides his business plan under an impenetrable eccentricity. It’s like talking to Elon Musk on twitter, if Elon Musk cosplayed as Disney instead of LARPed as Henry Ford.
He owns the private gaming firm Industrial Illusions, more known for its poker and blackjack DOS programs at the time in the United States than for collectible card games, let alone the holographic projection environments he eventually invented through subcontracting. From what little I heard about his rise in fortune at the time was that he had tried to set up a multilevel marketing approach for his previously-mentioned poker and blackjack programs; if you know anything about programming, and the nature of pyramid schemes, you’d know this only lasted the business quarter schedule equivalent of five minutes.
I met Mr. Pegasus at an MtG tournament in New York in the summer of 1999; why a billionaire would attend a live-streamed tournament full of sweaty neck beards at long-board tables escaped me for a few minutes, but I shook it off as a guy just having kind of cheap tastes. It was the kind of environment where spectating was better seen on a phone or tablet screen than in-person, granted this was well before reliable live-streaming let alone video coverage of card game tournaments, so at the time my work as a beat reporter was closer to being a blogger -- even if it was for a little hobby magazine with a circulation of less than a thousand. Pegasus was clearly bored, and a man in his position having fun here would be surprising to say the least. He also stood out here; this wasn’t a formal event and yet he wore a red double breasted suit with a cravat more at home in the seventeenth century.
Of course, when he spoke, his accent sounded less British and more Connecticut. It all made for the most surreal opening of conversation in my career.
“Are you tired of mucking about in this sweatlodge?” He asked me, suddenly, like he was trying to make condescending small talk. “Because I sure am.”
“I’m sorry? Were you expecting a wine tasting? These guys have no time for hygiene or style.”
I pointed out the table where Mark Le Pine was wrecking his quarterfinalist opponent with his famous land destruction combo—his opponent nearly flipped the table in frustration, but they shook hands as he accepted defeat as gracefully as he could manage. You could feel the tension in his wrist from a distance.
“They’re thinking about strategy and tactics,” I said. “Every day of their lives is devoted to playing a mind game with their opponent.”
“I see, I see, but,” Pegasus said. “I believe that there’s a gloriously untapped market. My boy,” he continued in the most confusing way to me at the time; ‘my boy,’ a Southern phrase as said with a Connecticut accent from the mouth of a British man, a more confusing pedigree than the creation of Pegasus’ card game. “My boy, what if I told you that, given all that makes Magi: the Gathering so famed here, that I could compete with the similar hold video games have in Japan?”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
“My boy, you underestimate that market’s ethic when it comes to insurmountability. I believe I have the right product just for them.”
He produced from his pocket a deck box. The brand label stood out to me, only in passing at the time, in big red and white letters: KONAMI. This was before their avalanche of internal scandals had torn the company to shreds in 2020, so the only thing I they were famous at that point was that they were the publisher behind Castlevania and Metal Gear Solid.
He let me examine the stack of forty cards. They were slightly taller and thinner than MtG cards, all in sleeves backed by Loony Toons characters. I asked Pegasus if I could see what the original card backs looked like; he simply stared at me blankly before saying ‘a portal straight to Hell, if that helps.’ I felt like Greg Sestero meeting Tommy Weisseu, though I know now I wouldn’t have the words for that until 2003 at least.
In MtG, the flow of the game is essentially a strategic race: players build up a base of mana to manage from, and use that mana to summon monsters and use spells. It’s a lot of careful maneuvering in the beginning, and then just as careful an execution by the end of the game, like a walts. The card effects borrow from a common glossary with a great many exceptions, but generally come up often enough that jargon like ‘tap’ and ‘trample’ are codified shorthand.
When I was reading the card effects for Pegasus’s prototype Duel Monsters deck— printed in English (when I asked him about why his Japanese game was printed in English cards, he said that he himself spoke to little to no Japanese, was able to read less than that, and hired translators for the japanese release, and that this deck was just a proof of concept) — the thing that stood out to me was the layerly way each card effect was spelled out. With some of these, you’d need a lawyer to parse them. What also struck out to me was the scale of the numbers involved in attack and defense values. Instead of 1 to 20, Pegasus opted for hundreds to thousands.
“What in the fresh hell is this game?” I asked.
He explained the basic gist of the rules. Like in Magic, this was a game about putting two players’ monsters against each other, until one conceded or the other ran out of Life Points (a measurement surprisingly easy to translate across games, scaling in the thousands or hundreds aside). Unlike Magic, though, players had to focus on decisive combos even right out of the gate. I remember thinking of Street Fighter at the time, and the concept clicked—strategy in this crazed game was also about reading an opponent, with the reflexes of someone counting frames, but in the slow motion of a turn. If a combo could ‘chain’ effectively, the only resources one had to pay attention to in this game were the cards in the hand and the cards in the deck.
“Is this even real?” I asked. “It just feels like Magic with the gas pedal turned on.”
“Well, It has a unique origin, my boy.”
Pegasus winked. Given the fact that his bleached platinum hair covered his other eye it might as well have been a blink. “I’ve made a few friends with the right people, all it needs is a little push and beyond an international success we have a worthy competitor in the card game world to Magic on both sides of the Pacific and Atlantic. Does the scoop of a lifetime sound that juicy to you, my boy?”
I almost laughed—like Open-mouthed, spittle-flying laughter—at this eccentric billionaire who carried himself like the bastard lovechild of Walt Disney and Peter Thiel. A competitor to MtG, based on a property in the land where card games have to compete against Mahjong, video games, and pachinko machines? This guy had to be out of his mind. At the time I thought his was a pipe dream, working prototype or not.
I obviously only made a note of it and left it in a desk drawer, since article deadlines lead me to publish the regional tournament report instead. I thought nothing of the eccentric billionaire, other than the fact that he was probably looking for a different convention entirely. He must have been out of his element to think that tournament organizers were at the time run by the designers of the game anything other than remotely. It wasn't as if he hadn't already not roped a more baffling publisher. Konami, at the time, was riding high off of their Metal Gear releases as well as titles like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, so their presence in the trading card game scene made me even more dismissive. I had thought Konami was simply trying some kind of money laundering scheme at that point -- for what? I didn't want to dig deeper.
Nearly a year later, I found out about the release of Duel Monsters in Japan. On a whim, essentially, remembering my meeting with Pegasus I decided to follow its meteoric, almost impossible rise to prominence, though until recently I was only an outsider looking in. In some ways it was too fast of a rise to really track it coherently. A blink one moment in the year 2001 became like a plague of locusts in the year 2005, and from there a subsidized activity in 2009, an arena spectacle in 2012, and from there an institution that we know and either love or hate today.
Over the course of forty years, two card games came to shape global business and politics, but one half of that equation was treated as a sport; consequential on a cultural level the way Football or Soccer used to be. That was Magic: the Gathering, home to the Northwestern and the Eastern Hemispheres gambling and politicking, a favored game among social circles and elites alike; much like a dueling glove or a coin toss or trial by combat, it could be called in to settle disputes.
In the year 2032 the Presidential election was resolved that way, over a nail-biting midnight match over the electoral votes in Florida (because of course it was Florida) -- the Floridian Secretary of State played a match against the Miami County Registrar Recorder -- the former playing a Black/Colorless deck, and the former playing a Red/Blue deck. The Supreme Court had to demand several rematches when they found that the Secretary of State had been running three Black Lotuses in his deck, a move blatantly illegal for fifty years by then.
But by 2002, on the other hand, Duel Monsters, a nightmarish chimera of pop-occultism, cryptology, and children’s card games, was already a matter of life-and-death, even when it only appeared to be mindless entertainment. If Magic: the Gathering was like a competitive sport, or at its worst a simple first-blood duel, Duel Monsters was a bloodsport, a gladiatorial match all around the world meant for the kind of raving and cheering that would make the Romans proud.
And yet, when it was first released, Pegasus had claimed that he found the game in ancient Egypt, in that an expedition decades before uncovered evidence of the priesthood playing so-called ‘shadow games’, and later used translated records of the game’s ‘rules’ to reverse-engineer its modern iteration. Egyptologists everywhere—every single one of them I talked to, or went on to study the game’s origins themselves— disputed that claim, and still do; in the academic world, the game is more Aleister Crowley than Ramses II. It’s 2000 release was at first lukewarm, the kind of lukewarm that only brought in the most dedicated of players, and written off by the vast majority of the public as a curiosity at best.
But that changed when a second billionaire became involved. Gozaburo Kaiba, CEO of an international tech conglomerate named after him, had an adopted son, Seto, who took to the game fiendishly, mainly as a collector but as well as a competitor. Seto would later use his familial clout within the conglomerate to create virtual reality technology, with the endorsement of both Crawford himself, and Duel Monster’s publisher, Konami, to bring the game ‘to life.’
At the time, the decision to go this route with the fledgeling game was hailed in tech circles as revolutionary but completely counterintuitive; why not develop VR technology for a board game while they were at it, so went the common refrain, or better yet make it more accessible through web applications. In the business world, Reuters ran an extensive critique of the decision. “Japanese Tech Giant to Sink in Frivolous Card Game VR Investments,” so said the headline in February 6th, 2001. The younger Kaiba, especially as he grew to take over the VR division and then the whole conglomerate years later, stood his ground throughout the entire product.
In October of 2003, he debuted the VR technology, what was infamously called a ‘Duel Disk System’ by ‘ironic’ fans of the American localization of the card game. Shortly thereafter the first, and at the time largest tournament the game had been a part, Battle City, was held. Kaiba himself was its last opponent; the logic of this decision, he had stated in his autobiography, was that ‘[Seto] wanted to emulate Pokemon gyms, only with the finalists being their own Elite Four, and himself as a piece of a final gauntlet to .’ When I dig deeper, especially when I had contacted Pegasus for this account, he claimed that Kaiba actually had the idea from the first major world tournament for Duel Monsters: Duelist Kingdom, held on Pegasus’s private island just north of New Zealand. That tournament was held just a year before Battle City, and was where the true theme of Duel Monsters tournaments took shape as gladiatorial matches.
Soon after, through a series of sponsorships that resulted from the sheer level of general curiosity surrounding the spectacle of a children’s card game tournament encompassing large metropolitan areas, even shutting down traffic in several freeways in Tokyo, both Duel Monsters and other card games of its ilk across the world began emulating some of Duel Monsters’ ethos. In late 2007, for one thing, Seto Kaiba ended up opening an academy whose primary purpose was to train ‘duelists’ who specialized in studying and playing the game.
From there, we have the world as we have it today -- intense and sometimes insane experiments in the kinds of spectacle. The developments in Duel Monsters’ spectator entertainment sector inspired a founding of what was then a dystopian league called the 5Ds Circuit, otherwise known as ‘Card Games on Motorcycles,’ for everyone else in the world. It is also why in the year of our lord 2036 we have a format of Magic: The Gathering tournament where it is commonly accepted to gamble job opportunities, or a format of Munchkin tournament where the highest prize you can win is a dedication on a statue outside of the offices of Steve Jackson games in Austin.
What often gets lost in the corporate backdoor skullduggery when telling the story of Duel Monsters’ rise is that most of the decisions regarding the operations of its early tournaments are the result of the pursuit of items found on that same Egyptian expedition. While the ‘lore’ behind the invention of the game is suspect, I tracked down the other members of the expedition to find out why Crawford would even bring that up in the first place in the advertisement let alone in interviews.
My investigation took me to the Mutou game store deep downtown in the Tokyo prefecture in the winter of 2030. There, I interviewed a little-known rival to Seto Kaiba, and a champion of the earliest known Duel Monsters Tournaments. From there, I learned the more personal history of the game, and how it tied into an underground movement of dark money, artifact trafficking black markets, and occultists (including a gang of bikers seeking to use the game to bring back Atlantean Trutherism, of all things) to make the foundations for the gladiatorial games we know of today.