Yu-Gi-Oh has been around for more than twenty years, and the franchise is still thriving to this day. From its anime to its trading cards game, Yugi Muto unleashed a spell on the anime fandom that has yet to let up. Of course, plenty of fans who grew up with the series like to look back on the good old days they had. And now, we’re here to tell you that you can literally look back at one of the anime’s original websites.
In a bid of Internet archaeology, Yu-Gi-Oh fans banded together recently to do a deep dive for content. It didn’t take long before gold was found, and social media is starting to catch up. After all, Toei Animation still has its 1998 website for the original Yu-Gi-Oh anime up and running.
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As you can see here, the Yu-Gi-Oh webpage is in Japanese, and it gives fans an idea of how the ’90s site worked. A bright yellow background takes up the webpage, and a manga sketch is displayed dead center with Yugi and Kaiba pictured.
If you do a bit of exploring, the website has one entry up from April 4, 1998. The post shares the original anime’s synopsis, and a young Yugi is shown inset with the blurb. The kid is shown assembling the Millennium Puzzle his grandfather gifted him, and that is just one page.
Sadly, a few of the subpages have been ruined by unreadable code, but some do exist. A character bios page still exists, and while the text is mangled, you can still cycle through a deck of Yu-Gi-Oh cards containing the leads. The final pages showcase the anime’s broadcast schedule for cable in Japan, and TV Asahi is linked out to directly.
Clearly, the website hasn’t aged well, but fans are mostly amazed to find the Yu-Gi-Oh site exists in 2021. This gift is just one of many lingering online to this day though some have since been updated. Space Jam, You’ve Got Mail, Amanda Please, and others have been uncovered in the last decade. And now, Yu-Gi-Oh can join the list.
Can you believe this old website is still up? Have you kept up with Yu-Gi-Oh in the years since? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB.
