A Game Boy publisher takes on the cards
Broccoli, a Tokyo company, is printed as the seller (発売元) on the back of the domestic Japanese boxes and packs, and their fronts carry a rights line for Hudson Soft and Takara, the Beyblade Project and TV Tokyo. The earliest dated evidence of finished cards is a Game Boy title sold from the same website: the Game Boy Color game 爆転シュート ベイブレード went on sale on Friday 27 July 2001 with five foil C.C.G. cards as a bonus. A secondary chronology, drawn from Japanese Wikipedia, gives July 2001 as the launch month; the oldest item on the archived C.C.G. news page, captured 9 September 2001, presents the game as newly on sale. No page we have read names the day.
The line at launch was small: a starter at ¥1,000 before tax with 40 cards, a rulebook and the stadium sheet that doubles as the playing surface; a booster at ¥200 with 7 cards drawn from 99 kinds; a box of 20 packs at ¥4,000; and four deck cases at ¥300 each for Draciel, Driger, Dranzer and Dragoon. On 30 August a ¥1,600 bundle paired the starter with a blue clear Dranzer S top available no other way, with Lawson taking reservations from 1 to 10 September for handover on the 21st.
Broccoli’s own pages only ever call the game ベイブレードC.C.G.; the longer name this site uses comes from the Japanese collector database. Most pages were written twice, in kanji and in kana, for young readers, and the entry rules for the 2001 Coliseum and the 2002 World Hobby Fair challenge admitted only children of elementary-school age.
The autumn of the Coliseum
Within weeks of launch the game had a national tournament. 爆転カードコロシアム 2001 ran qualifiers in seven cities, from Sendai on 9 September to Fukuoka on 21 October, 256 places each, allotted by return postcard. Three ran for two days, so ten winners went to the final on 3 November at the Kokugikan, the sumo hall in Tokyo, on the same day and in the same building as the final of the BBA Bey Battle Tournament, the toy championship.
The mascot, Card Blader Z, acted as MC and wrote a report on each qualifier; the reports for Tohoku through Kanto survive, none for Kyushu or the final. Broccoli’s front page shows an update dated 7 November 2001, four days on from the final, but no result of it was captured; the champion’s name survives only as a printed line on a card in the fourth version, which credits the 2001 national win to 何 竜悟, a reading we give as Ka Ryūgo without being certain of the surname. Shops ran their own sanctioned tournaments (こうにん大会) from 8 September 2001.
Two expansions inside the first year
The first expansion, Ver.2 大陸の覇者 (Conqueror of the Continent), brought in the Chinese and American teams, the White Tigers and the All Starz of the dub: a booster only, 7 cards for ¥200 before tax, 72 kinds split on the box back as 42 Beyblade, 20 special-move and 10 stadium cards. The Beyblade site’s news page lists it as on sale by 18 November 2001; the exact release date is on no page we have read.
Ver.3 氷河の帝王 (Emperor of the Glacier) is on the site’s card list by 23 March 2002. Its 72 kinds bring in Tala’s team, the Majestics and “Master” versions of Dragoon, Dranzer, Driger and Draciel, and its packaging adds a second rights line for Takao Aoki, the BB2 Project and TV Tokyo, the credit for the 2002 anime season. No news item announcing it survives, so its release date is unsourced.
Broccoli numbered the three versions in one run, 001 to 207, with 27 SP and 9 SSP cards alongside: 243 cards, 78 of them also printed as shiny parallels. The Ver.2 and Ver.3 kind splits on the boxes reconcile with the lists; the Ver.1 box’s split does not, and that photograph needs a second read.
2002: the fair, the shops and the strait
The year opened with the Next Generation World Hobby Fair, four cities between 20 January and 10 February 2002, with Card Blader Z on Broccoli’s stand. From 16 February to 7 April, 爆転カードコロシアム 2002 moved the tournament into 52 card shops and bookstores in eight regional blocks, with a promotional card and a clear file for every entrant and a card signed by Card Blader Z for the top finishers.
Across the strait, Sonokong sold the first version under a Korean-language wrapper titled Top Blade C.C.G., after the series’ Korean name: a Korean overprint on the Japanese design with 7 cards, 99 kinds, a 500 won price, a manufacture date of January 2002 and, along the bottom band, the printed text “Not sales for out of Korea.” One Ver.2 pack in the site’s collection, Japanese wrapper and all, carries a Sonokong back label, so the Japanese game crossed in its original language too. Broccoli’s site never mentions Korea; whether Ver.2 or Ver.3 had Korean-language wrappers is not yet sourced.
Late 2002: the Joint Booster, the film and Expansion 3
Captures from October and December 2002, read on 13 September 2026, carry the record four months further. On Friday 26 April 2002 Broccoli sold a Joint Booster at ¥1,600: three Ver.1 boosters, one of each expansion and a purple clear Driger F top, with no shooter or winder. Two constructed decks, the V2 deck and the Gaia deck at ¥500 each, went on sale first in the Toho cinemas showing that summer’s film, 激闘!!タカオVS大地. Two more followed as constructed character decks at the same ¥500: the Victory deck (Takao, Max and Kane; attack, defence and balance) and the Flash deck (Ozuma, Kai and Rei), each a stadium sheet with the rules plus 21 cards, three ready-to-play decks of seven. Shop tournaments ran into the autumn, in Niigata on 15 September and 26 October and in Utsunomiya on 16 September, with eight to twelve seats and entry for the price of a pack or nothing at all.
And the fourth version arrived. What the collector database calls Ver.4, Broccoli’s own news page calls Expansion 3, 古よりの伝承者, on sale by 13 December 2002 at ¥200 for a seven-card pack. It was illustrated with the anime’s CG renders rather than drawn art, and it introduced the MG system: magne-compatible Beyblade and special-move cards that combine for heavy damage, with the older, non-magne cards reworked so a careful player could still stand against them.
How it ended
The trail on Broccoli’s site now stops in mid-December 2002. The news page of 13 December still lists Expansion 3 as newly on sale, the tournament schedule was captured on 16 December, and the Wayback Machine holds nothing under the C.C.G. section after that; a request for the section’s index in March 2003 returned a 404. The card-list pages captured on 14 December still cover only Ver.1 to Ver.3, SP and SSP, so no list of Expansion 3 was ever published on the site. The collector database catalogues 25 of its cards, numbered between 220 and 266, among them the MG cards, a card for Card Blader Z himself and the card that names the 2001 champion; how many kinds the expansion ran to is not sourced. The secondary chronology that ends the run in September 2002 is too early: the game was still being sold and promoted in December. No primary source we have read states when it ended, and we do not state one.
How it is documented today
Three bodies of evidence carry this section. Broccoli’s site survives as 43 pages in the Wayback Machine captured between 5 August 2001 and 4 August 2002, plus 17 more from October to December 2002 read on 13 September 2026, including five card-list pages that give the number, name and kind of every card in Ver.1 to Ver.3, SP and SSP, and mark each card that has a parallel. The Japanese collector database tcg-db.nikita.jp holds 197 cards with their printed texts across all four versions, the two decks and seven promotional cards; it is the only source for Ver.4’s cards and for the printed statistics shown on this site. Our own card list was built from that database and completed on 13 September 2026 with the 104 cards that Broccoli’s lists carry and the database does not, so all 299 known cards are listed: 99 in Ver.1, 72 each in Ver.2 and Ver.3, the 25 catalogued from Ver.4, the two decks and the promos. The 104 carry a number, name, kind and version but no statistics yet. the site’s photographs of six sealed products, read on 11 September 2026, supply the printed prices, kind counts and rarity splits.
Every card and the packs and boxes are on the game’s page; how to play sets out what the pages reveal of the rules and the collecting guide covers what to look for. The site has no captures after 16 December 2002 and its 2003 request returned a 404, so the archive has now been read to its end.