Busy again. I’ll write & post a second and perhaps a third part when time permits.
1.
During our Christmas vacation, my spouse and I spent a lot of time lying around and watching Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, by Martin Billany (nom de internet LittleKuriboh). I’d never seen it before—though it’s got some degree of historical significance to internet pop culture, being to parodically fan-dubbed anime what Bob and George was for sprite comics.
I’d never seen the original Yu-Gi-Oh either. By the time it aired, I’d already outgrown Saturday morning cartoons. My wife, however, is young enough to have fond memories of watching it—though she readily admits that it was a stupid show developed for the sake of selling collectible card game product.
Having only seen LittleKuriboh’s parody of it, I’m not sure I’m qualified to explain Yu-Gi-Oh. But then again, I doubt an actual fan of the show could synopsize it without making the whole thing sound ludicrous.
The anime series Yu-Gi-Oh takes place in a world where a collectible card game along the lines of Magic: The Gathering called “Duel Monsters” is insanely popular and very serious business. People play it standing up, using miniature metal tables attached to their wrists that are also holographic projectors that make the spells and creatures represented on their cards appear in front of them. But there’s more! The content of the mass-produced game cards is secretly derived from ancient Egyptian gods and magic, and has some kind of spooky connection to them. The teenaged protagonist, Yugi, has improbable hair and came into the possession of an Egyptian artifact that makes his body a timeshare for the spirit of a long-dead pharaoh who’s really, really good at playing Duel Monsters. Several other Duel Monsters players have similar ties to ancient Egyptian magic and artifacts, and some are evil megalomaniacs. Things gets very mystical and ominous sometimes because the actual gods and monsters depicted on the cards are brought into play, and so then the fate of the world hangs in the balance of the card games’ outcomes, or something.
It’s real stupid.
Interesting thing, though: a longstanding IP that’s popularly regarded as being completely and 100% about card games and the people who obsessively play them didn’t begin that way at all. The Yu-Gi-Oh manga started out as a macabre vigilante power fantasy in which Yugi (or, rather, his alter-ego) dished out savage contrapasso to bullies, criminals, and other unsavory people.
Here’s how it would go: mild-mannered Yugi is out having fun with his high-school friends. Suddenly, some asshole shows up and starts pushing people around. Yugi wishes he could do something to help, oh how he wishes—and then when his stress level maxes out, his mystical dark side takes over and challenges the malefactor to play a game with him.
It could be any game, played with whatever is at hand. Skimming the manga, I’ve seen dice, a variation of air hockey, the “quiet game,” (where the first person to make a sound loses), and so on. The arrogant villain of the month readily agrees to Yugi’s challenge. He or she might try to cheat, but Yugi always finds some clever way of turning the tables because he’s preternaturally good at games. The defeated antagonist is subsequently afflicted with some poetically just torment, because the games are cursed games, or something along those lines. (Forgive me for my lack of deep interest in the lore of Yu-Gi-Oh.)
A few years into its run, the Yu-Gi-Oh manga became more like what people talk about what they talk about Yu-Gi-Oh. But it started off a horror-tinged comic about an avenging antihero whose “superpower” consisted of winning at all games, and the month-by-month draw was reading about what kind of game Yugi would play next and how he’d find a way to win.
This, in my humble opinion, is a much more interesting conceit than I summon Mega Ultra Chicken in attack mode! ad infinitum, and I wonder if the manga’s early readers ever got into overthinking-it discussions along the lines of Krakoa-era X-Men fans’ speculations about Isca, the Unbeaten.1 So, Yugi wins at all games—but what does that mean?
If Yugi becomes a lawyer and has to argue a case before a jury, does his spooky omnicompetence come immediately into play, or would it only work in a “mock trial” competition? If he gets a job as a bricklayer, does he suddenly become the fastest and most efficient bricklayer in the universe if another dude on the job site bets he can finish his side of the wall before Yugi? (A race is a game, isn’t it?) If Yugi is the master of all games, shouldn’t that mean there’s nothing he can’t conceivably do better than everyone else? Where do games end and “real life” begins?
2.
If you’ve been reading Banana Peel for any length of time, you should know to expect at least one block quote from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Let’s get it out of the way.
This one’s from the “Games” chapter, which shares the subtitle of the book. So—“Games: The Extensions of Man.”
Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release of particular tensions. They are collective and popular art forms with strict conventions. Ancient and nonliterate societies naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of the outer cosmic drama. The Olympic games were direct enactments of the agon, or struggle of the Sun god. The runners moved around a track adorned with the zodiacal signs in imitation of the daily circuit of the sun chariot. With games and plays that were dramatic enactments of a cosmic struggle, the spectator role was plainly religious. The participation in these rituals kept the cosmos on the right track, as well as providing a booster shot for the tribe. The tribe or the city was a dim replica of that cosmos, as much as were the games, the dances, and the icons. How art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story of the detribalization which came with literacy. Art, like games, became a mimetic echo of, and relief from, the old magic of total involvement. As the audience for the magic games and plays became more individualistic, the role of art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the humanly psychological, as in Greek drama. Even the ritual became more verbal and less mimetic or dancelike. Finally, the verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became a romantic literary substitute for the corporate liturgy and group participation.
As you might expect, McLuhan’s next remarks are about how television and other forms of electric media are currently (as in 1964) reversing the detribalizing configurations of print culture and restoring the segmented individual to a new (and different) state of total involvement. The implication for us here is that games take on different forms and meanings in the face of an extraordinary change in perceptions, attitudes, and values pursuant to a technological revolution. “When cultures change, so do games.”
The baggage that a twenty-first-century reader brings to McLuhan’s essay about games proves this point. I remember parsing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and erasing my penciled notes in the margins because I kept forgetting that game meant something different to a writer whose points of reference were chess, poker, soccer, and forms of children’s play centered around tossing and bouncing a ball than it connotes to a reader who more readily thinks of Minecraft, Hearthstone, Maple Story, Tetris, or even pinball. A lot of Wittgenstein and McLuhan’s expatiations on games do still make sense, but it is now necessary for the modern reader to bear in mind that their definition of “game” is more restricted than ours.
When we say “gamer,” after all, we’re usually talking about someone who plays video games. When I run a search for “game shop” and click the link to Yelp, I get an index of local businesses that sell things like Magic: The Gathering cards, Warhammer 40K figurines, and Dungeons and Dragons materials—games that would have been totally unrecognizable to McLuhan or Wittgenstein as games.
If anyone remembers the “are video games art?” conversation elicited by Roger Ebert’s public declaration that they were not, they perhaps remember having the nagging thought that it all hinged on how one defines “art.” By the time Ebert made his opinion known in 2012, the meaning of the word had for a long time grown ambiguous, encompassing such a diverse and capacious field that “art” could effectively mean whatever an interlocuter asserted it to mean.
From McLuhan’s remarks about art and games, we can infer that he felt there were grounds to distinguish between them. For him, athletic competition, dice, painting, drama, etc. ought to be regarded as discrete products from the disintegration of the “closed totality” worldview and contingent ritual practices observed by materially simpler preliterate cultures.2 But now neither art nor games are what they were during McLuhan’s lifetime. Not in form, and not in function.
We could tentatively say that games and art have merged under the conditions of the global village, where the lines between work, leisure, socialization, and identity have all become knotted together, reconstituting in a new form what previous technological paradigm shifts had split asunder.
3.
“Modern industry having reduced most jobs to a routine, games take on an added meaning in our society,” Christopher Lasch writes in his 1979 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. “Men seek in play the difficulties and demands—both intellectual and physical—they no longer find in work.”
Although the reference to the jobs of “modern industry” probably evokes the likeness of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, standing in place on an assembly line and tightening bolts with a pair of wrenches for hours on end, Lasch focuses more on the workers who facilitate the valorization of capital at a distance. His remarks about impersonal unreality of white-collar and service work anticipate David Graeber’s treatise on the “profound psychological violence” of bullshit jobs. When their labor becomes alienating and meaningless to them, Lasch says, “people seek abandon in play with more than the usual intensity.”
The “play” Lasch examines in The Culture of Narcissism primarily has to do with spectacle of professional athletics. He was writing in the late 1970s and hadn’t the opportunity to observe, for instance, the World of Warcraft phenomenon. Other developments, such as the professionalization of playing video games and the creep of complicated tabletop role-playing games into the respectable mainstream, were likewise beyond his outlook. Still, much of what he has to say about the character of games as a form of escape—working by intensifying the player’s awareness rather than dulling it—is applicable here.
Adducing the “degraded” state of sports and games as another piece evidence for the spiritual malaise of the United States, Lasch cites Johan Huizinga’s classic 1938 book Homo Ludens at some length:
[Huizinga] maintained that modern games and sports had been ruined by a “fatal shift towards over-seriousness.” At the same time, he maintained that play had lost its element of ritual, had become “profane,” and consequently had ceased to have any “organic connection whatever with the structure of society.” The masses now crave “trivial recreation and crude sensationalism” and throw themselves into these pursuits with an intensity far beyond their intrinsic merit. Instead of playing with the freedom and intensity of children, they play with the blend of “adolescence and barbarity” with Huizinga calls puerilism... “A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place," according to Huizinga. “The two spheres are getting mixed. In the activities of an outwardly serious nature hides an element of play. Recognized play, on the other hand, is no longer able to maintain its true play-character as a result of being taken too seriously and being technically over-organized. The indispensable qualities of detachment, artlessness, and gladness are thus lost.”
We’ll return to Lasch’s excoriation of professional sports and think about how well his etiological scheme applies to modern games later on. For now, though—some words about his emphasis on the intensity of interest in modern games, and about Magic: The Gathering as an exemplar he hadn’t the opportunity to cite.
4.
When I tell friends who’ve never played Magic (or have never really played it) that it’s a game one can never actually quit, I’m never joking. It’s been maybe four or five years since I last touched any cards, but I still keep track of the new releases. Even though I have no intention of playing it again, the idea of selling or tossing out my decks makes my chest go tight.
In addition to a substantial (and ongoing) financial investment, Magic demands a great deal of the player’s emotional, intellectual, and creative energy—and that’s what makes it so intoxicating. Actually playing the game with other people is comparable to the moment of orgasm during sex in that it occupies relatively little time compared to the labors involved in reaching that point—and sometimes isn’t even as pleasurable. Building an effective Magic deck requires an engineer’s attention to function and purpose, and is pursued with a spirit of personal (even artistic) expression in addition to competitive interest. You can expect to spend many hours testing a new deck through solitaire play, retooling it, testing it again, and perhaps partially dismantling it and starting from scratch if you can’t envision it doing what it needs to do in the play environment (the “meta”) you’re accustomed to. There are over twenty-six thousand functionally distinct cards in circulation, so if you’re playing a format which permits them all, building your ideal deck will probably entail doing a bit of research (and buying individual cards from online vendors if nobody in your playgroup has them or wants to trade for them).
It’s one hell of a time sink. It can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But it’s also much more gratifying, challenging, and personally meaningful than plodding around the sales floor of an understaffed CVS or processing insurance claims. Playing Magic and belonging to the game’s “community” likely has more immediately apparent social significance as well.
During the 2010s, a Magic enthusiast named Jesse Mason maintained a blog called “Killing a Goldfish” in which he reviewed each of the game’s “sets” in chronological order. It is really excellent reading if you’re familiar with the game, and even if you’re not, you might be interested in having a quick glance at one of his writeups to get an idea of how involved (and involving) the game is.3 Intellectually and socially, Magic is a gift that keeps on giving. When you’re not building decks or playing the game, you can think about the game (and it gives one a lot to think about) and share your thoughts with the online community.
Here’s a Stack Exchange thread about the set Mason reviews in the above link. In the longer replies, we glimpse a point of contact between Magic: The Gathering and professional sports. Skim them a bit and tell me you’re not reminded of long-winded baseball megafans reflecting on, say, the managerial decisions and player profiles that led to the outcome of a given World Series. (Notice how the author of the most upvoted reply states that it took him a few days to draft his post.)
In terms of intensity, this goes way beyond how my parents’ generation used to engage with games like bridge, Scrabble, or even chess. Magic is a serious game. It would not be hyperbole to say that for many players it is a lifestyle—or even a raison d'être.
5.
Isn’t it interesting that I’ve been italicizing Magic: The Gathering? I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. Suddenly it just seemed necessary.
I just spent half an hour on the Internet Archive, sifting through various periodicals’ style guides from the 1990s. Most always want journal and newspaper titles italicized. Some prescribe quote marks for the titles of books, films, TV and radio programs, etc.; sometimes they ask for italics. As far as I can tell, none specify any rules regarding the names or titles of games.4
Who’s surprised? Chess and poker were never italicized. Nor were Monopoly and Scrabble. For those, the thinking probably went that they were mere branded products or toys (do we italicize the proper noun in “my daughter’s Barbies?”), artifacts belonging to a category separate from books, records, films, or works of art. It never occurred to anyone to italicize Pogs—and were Magic cards a qualitatively different kind of product?
The Pearson Guide to the 2008 MLA Manual Style Updates prescribes italics for
all titles of independently published works (books, plays, book-length poems, periodicals, Web sites, online databases, television and radio broadcasts, CDs, record albums, performances, and works of art). Continue to use regular type and quotation marks for titles of stories, articles, songs, and other shorter works included in larger publications.
“Works of art.” Oh, lord. This reveals another facet of the the “are video games art?” controversy, doesn’t it? (If art: italicize; if not art: do not italicize.)
Even here, it was easy to argue that video games, as creative works with myriad technical points of contact with more established visual and narrative media, should be afforded the same consideration—and indeed the same respect—given to novels, films, TV shows, etc. in style rules. But something like Magic: The Gathering? It was still just a mere collectable toy-like product, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
The New York Times thought so as recently as 2023. The Washington Post and NPR were of the same mind.5 So is Britannica. None of them italicize Magic: The Gathering.
Wikipedia italicizes Magic: The Gathering. Fandom’s MTG Wiki italicizes Magic: The Gathering. Video game review site Polygon italicizes Magic: The Gathering. Geek product content mill Comic Book Resources italicizes Magic: The Gathering.6
Style guide provisions are not entirely insignificant. They can express a worldview and a set of values—as was demonstrated by the drama surrounding some publications’ new rules about capitalizing or not capitalizing the first letters of “black” and “white” (used as racial labels) after George Floyd was killed. By italicizing the names of games like Magic: The Gathering, we ascribe to them a legitimacy befitting their cultural clout.
6.
Assuming we take Lasch at his word when he claims that games “have assumed an importance unprecedented even in ancient Greece” as the result of the thoroughgoing rationalization of work and contingent forms of social life in which “art, religion, and finally even sex lose their power to provide an imaginative release from everyday reality,” we might suppose that high-commitment games like Magic: The Gathering would lose their reason for existence if our jobs, neighborhood communities, and domestic lives offered us as many opportunities for challenging self-application and satisfying participation. That isn’t going to happen, though: probably not without a catastrophic or (at the least traumatic) period of degrowth that materially simplifies production and consumption, and makes communal involvement and direct interpersonal obligation crucial to people’s welfare.
Lasch was a polemicist. Intrinsic to any project of diagnosing society’s ills is the danger of letting a foregone conclusion and moral disgust limit one’s perspective. That’s what I most admire about Marshall McLuhan: as a career English professor who looked to the horizon and descried the sunset of literacy and print culture, he should have been expected to rage against television and extol the timeless virtues of the book. Instead he boxed up his sentiments and set himself to work trying to understand the irreversible electronic media revolution and its implications.
What I’m saying is that Lasch isn’t wrong, but in referring to Huizinga’s observations about games coming to lack an “organic connection” with society, we ought to think of that society as one undergoing a radical transformation—turning into a new sort of organism for which certain practices perceived as non-useful or harmful in view of a past ethos may become structural necessities.
7.
Until recently, my most solid impression of Yu-Gi-Oh was from a satirical outing in the early-aughts webcomic Kid Radd:
“For my opening move, I select Desktor, the sinister accountant, and call upon his Red Tape of Obfuscation attack! Your team's speed shall now decrease by one half, and victory will be mine!”
“How predictable of you, Radd. But when my Generobot uses his X Mirror, the slowdown effect of your attack returns to your team - doubled! Your characters are now nearly immobile and you are powerless! Mwa ha and ha!”
“Fool! You forgot that undead creatures like my Skull Guy have reverse status ailments, and thus, he gains super speed! He gets 3 moves per turn from now on, so now he'll cure his teammates AND attack yours!”
From what I can tell, that’s pretty representative of how a dramatic “action” sequence in Yu-Gi-Oh plays out.
Back when I was unfamiliar with (but aware of) Yu-Gi-Oh, I assumed the show owed its popularity to the bare fact that young children will watch anything if it’s on television during Saturday morning. In the middle of marathoning through LittleKuriboh’s abridged series, I decided that the designs of its male characters were its secret weapon: twelve-year-old boys watching it must have thought Yami Yugi, Kaiba, Marik, etc. were just the coolest, while twelve-year-old girls wanted to marry them. (My wife has verified this.)
But now I don’t think that’s the whole story.
In a way, Yu-Gi-Oh anticipated what we’ve been seeing in the sphere of isekai webtoons, whose narratives are self-consciously fictional narratives in which fiercely interior-monologuing protagonists inhabit stock-character roles in genre novels they’ve read or video games they’ve played. They’re literally stories about people in stories. In a media environment inundated with fictional content and cultural commentary, readers evidently find stories about other readers (who suddenly discover that their favorite mass market fiction isn’t as evanescent as supposed, and that their knowledge of it has suddenly become a matter of tremendous practical importance) more compelling and relatable than ones that make the pretense of being about “real” people in a “real” world. This genre couldn’t have exploded in popularity unless readers had been prepped to receive it by developments elsewhere.
Yu-Gi-Oh is what the 1997 Pokémon anime would have been if Ash Ketchum roamed the countryside with a Game Boy and link cables in his pocket instead of his pokéballs. In dramatizing for a children’s cartoon the fictional world and events of the video game instead of the game itself, the Pokémon anime situated itself on the twentieth-century side of the Y2K era in terms of its sensibilities. True, the game came with a readymade story (or the outline of one) and characters (or sketches of them), and it would have made for awkward cross-platform synergy to disregard it all—but part of me suspects that if Pokémon’s television adaptation had entered into development just a few years later, its producers would have been at least a little tempted to cast Ash Ketchum as a Tokyo high school student in a world where entertainment, sport, and culture were all dominated by a handheld player-versus-player game featuring electric rodents and squirting turtles.
By the time the Yu-Gi-Oh anime debuted in Japan in 2000, audiences were ready for it.7 Nobody who’d ever played PC or console RPGs from series like Ultima, Might and Magic, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, etc., needed turn-based combat, life points, attack points, and so on explained to them. Viewers familiar with tabletop games like Magic: The Gathering, or with PVP video games like Street Fighter, StarCraft, or, yes, Pokémon recognized through personal experience the potential for dramatic tension and cathartic reversals in these newfangled entertainments. For them, Yu-Gi-Oh pretty instantly made sense.
I’d imagine the number of people with first- or secondhand knowledge of the sort of games from which the fictional Duel Monsters is derived increased monumentally between 1990 and 2000. The difference between someone like my grandfather and me is that were both disposed to think a show like Yu-Gi-Oh was dumb (not that he ever knew it existed), except for him the whole concept of it would have been incomprehensibly and obnoxiously foreign.
[TBC]
She was an interesting, if implausible antagonist. Her mutant power was to literally win everything. If you told her “I bet a hundred bucks that you can’t throw a dozen eggs in the air and catch them all without breaking any,” she could then throw a dozen eggs up in the air and catch them all without breaking any. This had its drawbacks: if her half-demon tyrant boyfriend was going into an arena deathmatch, and you went up to her in the stands and told her “I bet you the other guy loses,” her boyfriend was doomed. Fun stuff.
On “closed totalities,” see Lukács.
Many years ago, looking for work, I answered a Craiglist ad for an editing job. Some elderly fellow wrote a weekly column or blog or newsletter about stock trading; the person who tidied up and refined his stuff had apparently quit, and a new one was required. After sending my resume, I was emailed a sample column to go over and clean up. I had no idea what the fuck any of it said, even though I understood the dictionary definition of every individual word. Probably that’s what it’s like reading Magic: The Gathering discourse as somebody who’s never played it—and I assure you, Magic is just as abstruse as stonks.
(I didn’t get the job, by the way.)
The Internet Archive has some scans of early Nintendo Power issues. Both magazine titles (its own) and video game titles are italicized in the editor’s letters, but no titles are italicized (or placed between quote marks) anywhere else. Hmm.
And yet here I am, not italicizing Britannica, Wikipedia, MTG Wiki, Polygon, or Comic Book Resources.
Rather, the second anime series. The first (see the “ace of diamonds” screencap above) aired on Japanese television in 1998, and followed the early manga volumes in depicting Yugi’s alter ego as a sadistic antihero who played games other than Duel Monsters. It never left Japan, and even there it seems to have been memory-holed.
Oh man. I didnt think I could get triggered by an internet opinion ever again but here I am ; feeling the indignation I used to feel back in my 10s, when people criticized Digimon and I just HAD to write a rant about how much the americanized version ruined it...
Which is ironic, given that I've been following your writings ever since your quite negative review of Chrono Cross - a game I readily considered my favorite.
I wasnt triggered back then, but you taught me about nuance and I've been a fan of yours ever since.
Anyway.
I'm not going to pretend Yu-gi-oh! is some amazing manga but it is true that 4Kids! and the tiresome irony of LittleKuriboh (children card games xD) cemeted the anime as some commercial slop to sell cards for at least 20years. I've seen that opinion changing lately though, because the reality is that it's a manga made by a game nerd with some deep appreciation for the craft.
It's evident, when one loves Magic the Gathering or DnD, that the battles in Yu-gi-oh! completely channel the kind of excitement one feels playing games.
The story is stupid? Most of pop culture stories are stupid taken as face value! Do super heroes need these flashy costumes to fight crime??
At least the morals in that manga was earnest considering how the author met his demise 3 years ago!
Nah honestly. I readily admit it's kinda silly but so is a lot of stuff. What triggered me was some unwillingness of culture to engage with YGO in earnest. I had that phase in my teens, when I watched the abridged version, but as a late 20s adult, it is that ironic detachment I find stupid.
I wonder it's because I yearn to view these trite, evanescent (games, anime) as serious things or I am trying to unite the best of childhood - sincere enjoyment in play and silly things - with the best of adulthood - emotional and philosophical maturity.
Sorry for the rant. Like I said, you triggered a deep, sealed, nerd instinct because you are my favorite essayist and this will give me many things to ponder. I recommend you to all my intellectual-minded friends.
Read the manga ( :^) ) and keep up the good work!
PS : Now that I think about it. I think you and your wife could /REALLY/ love Kaiji. It's on Netflix right now. It's also about card games but much less silly. It inspired squid games, not the other way around.
As an avid Yu-Gi-Oh! fan and player since kindergarden, this was a treat to read. My 10 year-old self would've impudently raged at this column for daring to malign his beloved pastime, but - thankfully - as that boy aged, he came to recognize his hobby as the "as-seen-on-TV" commercial extension of a 90's-era shonen media suite. My feelings about the game, animanga, and its spinoffs hardly differ from yours toward Magic (with respect to that specifically, the game alone). Incidentally, I first encountered this attitude in yet another child of the 80's, a casual acquaintance in a Discord server that I've hung out in for several years: mocking the ostentatious nature of Yu-Gi-Oh! while extolling MTG's virtues as a deep, thought-intensive game.
To complement this piece with some emic insight on the card game's nitty-gritty: you may know that unlike MTG and Pokemon, YGO lacks a fundamental resource system. This resulted in powercreep becoming progressively severe with age, as new card design was forced to adapt to ever more powerful competition, and...you get the idea. Coupled with the fact that much of the entire franchise's popularity is permanently anchored to a cartoon which finished airing in '04 ('06 in the U.S.). YGO was simultaneously forced to adopt a "Universes Beyond" approach in adapting its aesthetic to match its contemporaries (https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Lovely_Labrynth_of_the_Silver_Castle) while ruthlessly pandering to nostalgia for the original series (https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Dark_Magician_the_Magician_of_Black_Magic) to survive. While I wouldn't say that it's on life support, persistent mismanagement by its developers and extremely heavy association with a specific generation of (currently) young men likely means that it's fated to die by the end of the century. Curiously - and despite being roughly as old - Neon Genesis Evangelion, for one, doesn't seem to have the same issue, as its original purpose was not to hawk merchandise...though this later became so prolific that the degree thereof turned into a meme.
The increasingly absurd power-level of the "modern" game resulted in (former) players thereof congregating around eternal formats and creating fanmade communities dedicated to reviving them, which became so monumentally popular that Konami was more or less forced to officially support them, which it now does. "Yugiboomers" such as myself, as they're sometimes derisively called in the community, have found their favorite flavor of the game in these snapshots of its history: a static card pool and rules which existed at a particular point in time deemed especially great by their players, forever frozen, never to receive a new card or update. This is an even more complex - or possibly just advanced - form of nostalgia.
In case you haven't lost all respect for me through this revelation: I recently became interested in Magic's Pauper format, as its notorious Mono Blue Terror deck caught my eye and siphoned a modicum of funds from my wallet. ...Come to think of it though, declaring myself to be a blue player might be an even greater cause for disdain.