Kazuo Takahashi was a Japanese manga artist born in Tokyo on October 4, 1961. He began his professional career using the pen name Hajime Miyabi, winning the Shogakukan New Comic Award in 1981 for his one-shot Ing! Love Ball. After working as a commercial designer, he made his serialized debut in 1986 under his birth name, Kazuo Takahashi, with the manga Go-Q-Choji Ikkiman. This work was a manga adaptation of the anime of the same name, a sports series about a futuristic form of baseball known as Battle Ball, and was published in Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine. Following this, he created several other works published in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump, including the one-shots Tokio no Taka and Battle Mind, as well as the short serialization Tennenshoku Danji Buray, which ran from 1991 to 1992. Takahashi found limited success with these early projects before changing his pen name to Kazuki Takahashi. In 1996, he launched Yu-Gi-Oh! in Weekly Shonen Jump, a manga that would become a worldwide phenomenon. The series, which concluded in 2004, centered on a boy who solves an ancient puzzle and becomes involved in high-stakes games, particularly the fictional card game Duel Monsters. Yu-Gi-Oh! spawned a highly successful trading card game that holds a Guinness World Record as the best-selling trading card game of all time, as well as multiple anime adaptations and films. Takahashi remained involved with the franchise after the manga's conclusion, supervising spin-off manga like Yu-Gi-Oh! R and Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, and providing the original story for the film Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions. Later in his career, he returned to creating original short works, including the one-shot Drump in 2013, the limited series The Comiq in 2018, and the two-part manga Secret Reverse, a Marvel Comics collaboration, in 2019. His artistic style evolved from a comical gekiga influence in his early work to a style that incorporated elements from Western illustrators such as Drew Struzan, Alphonse Mucha, and Norman Rockwell. A recurring theme in his most famous work is the centrality of games, reflecting his personal interest in shogi, mahjong, card games, and tabletop role-playing games. In 2015, he received the Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International for his contributions to comics. Kazuo Takahashi died on July 4, 2022, at the age of 60. He was found off the coast of Nago, Okinawa, having drowned while attempting to rescue people caught in a rip current.