Some of my most cherished early videogame memories are of playing Yu-Gi-Oh games as a grade schooler while understanding about 10% of the rules. I tried to revisit the game once I was older, but found its head-spinning, combo-centric gameplay a mite too head-spinning and combo-centric. I liked Yu-Gi-Oh because I could play Dark Magician and he looked really sick, and there were big numbers on his card, but the modern whippersnapper’s Yu-Gi-Oh has added all these layers of complexity that my geriatric mid-twenties brain can’t reckon with. What I really need is a videogame where I can relive the glory days in peace; or better yet, fourteen of them.
If you’re a luddite like me or just a nostalgia-riddled superfan, you too might get a kick out of Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection, a collaboration between Konami and videogame documentarians Digital Eclipse. It spans the early history of Yu-Gi-Oh!’s forays into a digital space, emulating a variety of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games. It might be hard to picture now, but there was a time when Yu-Gi-Oh! was as ubiquitous as Pokémon in comic shops and on middle school cafeteria tables, with every kid in the know craving a Duel Disk and trying to make sense of Yugi Matou’s weird purple hair spikes.
