Creator of manga phenomenon ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ found dead in the sea

Kazuki Takahashi, the 60-year-old creator of the Japanese franchise Yu-Gi-Oh!, was found dead in the sea on Wednesday. He was floating about 300 meters from shore and was wearing snorkeling gear.

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‘Let’s duel!’ Anyone who grew up in the 2000s may have heard the battle cry on the playground. The catch phrase was called by the characters from the Japanese anime series Yu-Gi-Oh!, which was broadcast in Belgium from 2003 on what was then VT4, today Play4. The mastermind behind the series, Kazuki Takahashi, was found dead in the sea on the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa on Wednesday.

What exactly happened is still unclear. On Wednesday, a firefighter fished a corpse from the sea about 300 meters from the coast, after ‘a floating body’ was reported. The deceased man was wearing a snorkel, goggles and flippers, and was identified a day later as 60-year-old manga artist Kazuki Takahashi. His rental car was found 12 kilometers away on a country road on the beach. The Japanese media assume that he was on vacation alone.

Takahashi rose to fame in the late 1990s as the author of Yu-Gi-Oh!a manga series that started in 1996 in the popular comics magazine Shonen Jump and ran until 2004. The story, about the wimpy boy Yugi Moto who becomes possessed by the ghost of an Egyptian pharaoh, became a worldwide hit as a cartoon series. Yugi and his alter ego fight all kinds of duels in it according to the card game Duel Monsters, in which an army of monsters and magical creatures compete against each other. The derivative card game, a variant of quartet, became all the rage among children and was the best-selling trading card game ever, according to Guinness World Records.

Yu-Gi-Oh!, Japanese for ‘king of games’, is typical of the toy fad that spread from Japan to Europe in the first half of the 2000s. During that period, parents were driven to despair by their children successively using Pokémon cards, Beyblade-spin and then Yu-Gi-Oh!-demanded cards. VT4, now Play4, achieved great success in the children’s segment by broadcasting those series after school.

Takahashi himself took it easy after the success of his comic series. He oversaw the spin-offs and occasionally drew new comics. The comic series was published by Dargaud under the manga label Kana.