Wen | Huang Yuxiang
One of the most commercially successful manga artists, Kazuhi Takahashi, drowned in snorkeling in July. Takahashi Manga's "Game King" extended the card game popular all over the world, with a circulation of 35 billion copies, making him the most taxed cartoonist at one point, and many rare cards are extremely valuable in the second-hand market.
Kazuki Takahashi is one of Japan's most commercially successful manga artists of all time, and the muto game, Seahorse, and Katsuru Kinouchi in the manga King of Games are also classic duelist characters, but as authors, they died unexpectedly in the limits of their struggle with life, according to the Japan Broadcasting Association (NHK), Takahashi died of an accidental drowning accident during snorkeling in the Okinawa area in July, and there were shark bite wounds on his body, and the cause of death in the judicial autopsy was drowning.
At the age of sixty-one, Kazuki Takahashi, once japan's most taxed manga artist, did not create much manga in his later years, but focused on sports, but the "King of Games" he left behind is still a classic of Japanese manga. The magic of the "Game King" has also rushed out of Asia and swept Europe and the United States, and famous card characters such as "Blue-Eyed White Dragon" and "Black Magic Guide" are the collective memory of the post-90s generation around the world.
His "King of Games" is not the most popular comic, and the sales of comics are certainly not as good as the "One Piece" that has been serialized so far, and even the hot "Devil's Blade" in recent years is not as good as that of "Devil's Blade", but it has found another way to dominate the world in the sales of related game products. The resulting King of Games trading card game is the most successful table game in the world, setting two Guinness world records – "the world's most sold trading card game" (2517 million cumulative sales in 2011, current circulation of 35 billion), "the largest number of participants in the exchange card game competition", the total sales of "Game King" cards are estimated to reach 1 trillion yen (about 7.2 billion US dollars), thus making Takahashi and Kei the most taxed cartoonists in the 2000s. With about 1.1 billion yen (about $7.9 million) in taxes, Kazuki Takahashi remains one of the top five most profit-making manga artists in Japanese history.
The popularity of "Game King" in China began in the late 1990s, and the first few years of the new century, the Chinese version of the animation was broadcast in Taiwan's Huashi and Hong Kong's Hong Kong, and it was not released in Chinese mainland at all, although the card game has been very popular, but "Konami" has not launched Chinese version of the card, only Japanese, Korean and English versions of the card, resulting in the cards sold in China at that time are basically pirated, until 2020 to release the Chinese Simplified version of the card, "Game King" Chinese Traditional version of the card was released in 2014, but was discontinued in 2016 due to poor sales.
Takahashi and Hidaigi were late in their formation
In contrast to many young manga artists, Takahashi and Akira can be said to be late in the day, "Attack on Titan" began serialization at the age of twenty-three, the best-selling evergreen manga in Japanese history", "One Piece", began serialization at the age of twenty-two by the author Eiichiro Oda, and even Akira Toriyama, who was regarded as a late bloomer, began serializing "Dragon Ball" at the age of twenty-nine, but Takahashi and Akira's manga path was difficult, and it can even be said that it was a late success, and it was not until the age of thirty-five that they began to serialize the famous "Game King" in the Weekly Shonen Jump.
Before the serial Game King, Takahashi and Kei worked for a game company, both as illustrators and as game designers. Therefore, "Game King" in the early stage of the series, interspersed with a large number of various games, including yo-yo, electronic chicken and many authors of the original game, the initial "Game King" comic is biased towards dark fantasy, in the style of exploration period, quite the same period of popular "JoJo's wonderful adventure" flavor, the early dark content of the comic, cruel punishment in the animation version released after two years has also been deleted a lot. The ninth episode of the King of Games comic book introduced a trading card game called "Magic and Sorcery", which was later called "King of Games" because of the popularity of the Game King animation. It laid the tone of "King of Games" with "trading card games" as the core, and the games in "King of Games" later refer to card games.
"King of Games" has a magnificent story, telling the story of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Atum who traveled through thousands of years of history, came to the modern era through the resurrection of the soul of the millennium building blocks, shared the body with the modern Muto game, played cards and adventures, and retrieved the memory of the pharaoh. "Game King" is based on a large number of ancient Egyptian myths, the "three illusory gods" in the story are all based on ancient Egyptian mythology, such as "La's Pterodactyl Dragon" is derived from the ancient Egyptian sun "La", "Osiris's Sky Dragon" is taken from the myth of "Pluto", in addition to ancient Egyptian mythology as the main axis, but also widely absorbed from all over the world mythology, fairy tales as the theme, in the late nineties of the Japanese manga industry is not common, so it emerged.
King of Games' trading card game is not original to Takahashi and Niki, just as "Three Kingdoms Kill" is not Chinese original, based on the Italian design Emiliano Sciarra, based on western cowboys, but it was carried forward by Chinese. The prototype of the "King of Games" is the American Richard. Richard Garfield's "Magic" (also known as "Magic: The Gathering"), the same kind of comic works in the same period as "Duel Master"), also have derivative card games, "King of Games" can stand out among many games and comics, one is because of the popularity of animation, and the other is because its game rules are more perfect (more complex) and have more room for play.
The commercial success of "Game King" is inseparable from the popularity of animation, the important cards in the animation "Blue-Eyed White Dragon" and "Black Magic Guide" in the real card distribution process, Konami also deliberately created rarity, through limited distribution, special release and other methods, pushing up the sale price, secondary auction market, related "rare cards" can be speculated to millions of yen prices, the most exaggerated case is in 2021, China once "Game King" "20th Anniversary Edition Blue-Eyed White Dragon" gold card, The starting price was 80 yuan (about 12 US dollars), but after more than 2,000 rounds of auctions, the transaction price was as high as 87 million yuan (about 12.88 million US dollars), and finally due to the high price, which led to government intervention, the Intermediate Court of Chuzhou City, Anhui Province, temporarily suspended the relevant auction, on the grounds that "the bidding price is seriously inconsistent, there may be malicious speculation and bidding behavior", which shows the huge market for the "King of Games" card.
The huge interests of the card game also influenced the development of the anime and manga of "Game King", and the original work of Takahashi and Yuki ended in 2004, and in the subsequent spin-offs, Takahashi and Kei were only responsible for image supervision and did not participate in the conception of the story.
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