The Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection Reminds Me How Far Games Have Come

Recently, I had the pleasure of reviewing the Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection here at ComicBook. This collection, which came out on February 27th, spans the earliest video games in the franchise – from 1998’s Duel Masters through to 2005’s 7 Trials to Glory: World Championship Tournament. As much as I love retro games like this, I rarely get to make time for them these days, and returning to the Game Boy through Game Boy Advance era after all these years took me back to the early days of gaming in ways I didn’t anticipate.

When I first loaded up Duel Masters, the game’s simplicity surprised me. It is, at the end of the day, basically just a card game simulator. You do set your duelist name, but otherwise, you’re just looking at your cards and your opponents. There’s no real story to it. You just duel, repeatedly, against the same few duelists until you beat them enough to progress to the next round. These days, so many games are focused on more, more, more. More open worlds, more collectibles for streamers and gamers to chase, and more ways to top those Steam concurrent charts. It was fascinating to be reminded how simple gaming used to be, and how much fun it can be to focus on the simple joy of a game without that completionist need to grab trophies and achievements.

For all that I enjoyed the simplicity of the early games, the trip through gaming history also helped me appreciate how much better gaming has gotten over the years. During the Game Boy Advance era, it’s clear gaming was going through a bit of a Jurassic Park phase. They didn’t ask if they should, they just asked if they could. As technology advanced, features like a rapidly scrolling animated screen behind the duel mat and other odd choices showcased that what you could do in gaming was getting more sophisticated. These experiments didn’t always make the games better, but they were no doubt an important step in learning what works – and what doesn’t. While newer games still have plenty of missteps, the overall experience of gaming has so much more to offer in terms of variety and basic playability than it did in the early days.

But by and large, the biggest thing that stuck out to me was how much more inclusive gaming has become and how much more expansive the assumed audience is than it was in the days of those early Yu-Gi-Oh! games.

Being a millennial gamer, I grew up at a time when video games were very much assumed to be a thing for boys. Even all these years later, I still look back fondly on that first time Professor Oak bothered to ask me if I was a boy or a girl. Before then, I simply had to put up with the fact that every video game assumed I must be happy with a little pixel boy as my avatar. After all, what would a girl be doing picking up a video game, anyway? I spent my early years as a gamer playing roles like Mario, Link, and a Pokemon trainer in a baseball cap. I don’t think about that often these days, when many games let you customize your avatar at least as far as choosing between a feminine and masculine body type. But jumping into Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards really took me back.

At the beginning of the game, you’re asked to put in your name. It didn’t occur to me to think anything of it, so I typed mine in. Soon, I saw that the little pixel person representing me was distinctly male-coded. This shouldn’t have surprised me, given that the game came out in 2003, but somehow, it did. The graphics were good enough by that point in history that the fact that my avatar didn’t have a ponytail in sight caught my attention. It took me out of the game in a way I know it wouldn’t have back in my younger years before I had any other options. And then, my childhood crush Joey Wheeler hit me with the “he/him” pronouns. What a blow to my younger self if she only knew.

Yet of course the game assumed I’d be a boy. In 2003, things like Yu-Gi-Oh! weren’t expected to appeal to girls like me. Never mind that I was a big fan of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragonball Z. Those things didn’t think of me or anyone like me as their audience, and so, even when the game let you name yourself, there was no question about the gender of the names that would be typed in those little boxes.

RELATED: Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection List Confirms Every Yu-Gi-Oh! Game in the Release

These days, games can easily come under fire from a certain kind of game for what some view as an overcorrection towards the kind of inclusivity my younger self craved. Yet it started with something as simple as letting players pick between two little options, something that I’ve already started to take for granted to the point that I was shocked when it wasn’t available to me. It was a small part of the experience, but it made me stop and consider just how easy it is to forget how far gaming has come in the last 20-odd years.