The History of Carddass
Carddass is the name of Bandai's card vending machines, and by extension of every card those machines sell. The name was inspired by AMeDAS, the Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System, Japan's weather data network: the idea was that Carddass would do for children what AMeDAS does for weather, gathering and dispensing information. Look at the back of an early Carddass card, dense with a character's data, and the weather station logic is printed right there. Carddass is a registered trademark of Bandai.
1988: SAINT SEIYA, AND CARDS TO COLLECT
Before there was a gameThe first Carddass, released in 1988, was based on the Saint Seiya anime series. In those years Carddass was for trading and collection only: character cards, bought one turn of a vending machine dial at a time, with no game attached. The roster that followed reads as a roll of Japanese popular culture: Dragon Ball, Gundam, Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, YuYu Hakusho, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, Naruto, One Piece, Neon Genesis Evangelion and dozens more anime, manga and tokusatsu series all passed through the machines.
The scale is part of the record. Bandai Namco's own fact book counts 17.767 billion Carddass cards sold from 1988 to March 2021, with Dragon Ball alone past two billion by 1998. For a Japanese child of the 1990s, cards did not begin with a game store. They began with a machine outside one.
THE GAMES ARRIVE, AND CARDDASS ADAPTS
Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Data CarddassWhen trading card games became popular in Japan, Carddass changed with them: more and more Carddass cards were made in playable trading card form. The line carried a Yu-Gi-Oh! card game of its own, based on the Toei anime, a separate production from Konami's card game and not to be confused with it. In 2005 Bandai introduced Data Carddass, arcade machines that read specially designed cards to unlock in-game content such as weapons, characters and clothes, and the family later extended to AR Carddass for mobile devices and Net Carddass online.
Carddass is also where this shelf's Pokémon story starts. Bandai's Pokémon Carddass cards reached the machines in September 1996, ahead of the trading card game, and were never produced outside Japan. The next page settles that claim properly.