Games: Yu-Gi-Oh! Comes to America

PRODUCT Trading cards

HOW IT STARTED Yu-Gi-Oh! began life as a Japanese comic strip

JUDGMENT A secret world beyond parents; it’s bound to succeed

From the same marketing masterminds who catapulted Pokemon into every U.S. schoolyard comes Japan’s latest export: Yu-Gi-Oh!, featuring Yugi, a nerdy kid who uses magical powers to morph into a spiky-haired, hubcap-eyed hero with a grownup bod. Yugi is an ace cardplayer who battles (using cards, of all things) with electric lizards, man-eating bugs and all manner of mystical creatures in a complex, secret world that youngsters (mostly boys ages 9 and up) can’t get enough of and–lucky for the kids–most parents can’t be bothered to understand. Yu-Gi-Oh! began in 1996 as a comic strip in Japan (over $2 billion in Yu-Gi-Oh!-related products have sold there). In the U.S., it rolled out last fall as a Saturday-morning ‘toon on Kids’ WB!, where it soon ranked No. 1 in its time slot. In March the multimedia merchandising was launched: out came video games for Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Game Boy and action figures from Mattel. Also, beginning in that same month, came the trading cards–dribbled out just slowly enough to create scarcity. Interest, however, is anything but scarce: the Yu-Gi-Oh! website logs 1.2 million hits a day.

–By Janice M. Horowitz