Naruto Digital Card Game Launches From Sekai, TV Tokyo

“Naruto” fans will have access to the popular anime franchise’s first-ever digital card game with Thursday’s worldwide launch of the officially licensed “Naruto Ninja Cards.”

Described as “a gamified card-collecting experience,” “Naruto Ninja Cards” lets app users collect the series’ most iconic characters in card form, uncover exclusive artworks, and enjoy real-time strategic activities with friends.

While the offering, the only free-to-play “Naruto” app on the App Store and Google Play, may seem like a small-scale project, the game has been five years in the making for Paris and Tokyo-based indie studio Sekai.

After launching as an anime-focused startup in 2021 and a few rounds of brainstorming and development talks, the initial four-person Sekai team set out to land the rights to make a “Naruto” app from Japanese broadcaster TV Tokyo. (There have been many unofficial “Naruto” apps and projects launched over the years, but few approved by the IP owner.) The network not only ended up partnering with Sekai, but also invested in the studio, marking its first investment in a Western company since it backed Crunchyroll.

“We spent a year and a half in Japan convincing the IP’s owners to trust us, and became the first foreign studio ever licensed to build this,” Samy Therain, cofounder and CEO of Sekai, says. “We’re giving our soul to this project. Half a million fans felt it, and showed up before we ever asked. Today’s launch is theirs.”

“The Sekai team’s genuine passion for ‘Naruto’ is what truly resonates with fans worldwide,” TV Tokyo head of global distribution Hiroaki Saiki says. “I trust that their care, patience, and deep understanding of the series’ core spirit will drive the success of this product!”

Sekai’s investors also include Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park (a band whose music is closely tied to the “Naruto” fan-edit community), NBA All-Star Rudy Gobert, Skycatcher, Makers Fund and Alexis Ohanian’s fund 776.

According to Sekai, since “Naruto Ninja Cards” soft launched Feb. 5 the app has seen 500,000 downloads, 93% of which it says is from organic search. The team credits its early success to “never-before-seen hand-drawn artworks, Easter eggs hidden for those who know the series by heart, and updates shaped by fan feedback since day one.”

Though today is the worldwide launch for “Naruto Ninja Cards,” just a few years ago the Sekai team was mourning the project before it even got off the ground.

After months of grinding at licensing expos and networking events, a chain-reaction of high-profile introductions (including meetings with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao and former Toei Animation boss Kanji Kazahaya) Therain says Sekai had its first sit-down with the TV Tokyo team in January 2022. Over the course of a year and a half living in Japan and months of discussion and negotiations and relationship-building with TV Tokyo, Therain says Sekai was “ghosted” by the network and didn’t know why.

From here, Sekai plans to not only grow the “Naruto Ninja Cards” app, but also expand into additional anime-inspired AAA games and even live events.

“When they don’t reply to one email, you know something is wrong, and so that’s what happened. And for a month, we had no news,” Therain tells Variety. “So that’s why I flew. I flew again to Japan, and I wanted to get a chance to go to them. That’s why my hotel room was across the street from their office because I knew, when I’m there, I need to be available if they want to talk to me. I’m right across the street, and so we went there with two of my co-founders and we waited a bit.”

The rain says the Sekai team received guidance from industry insiders that this turn of events likely meant the deal was going to “fade away.” Then they learned “Naruto” author Masashi Kishimoto had not signed off on the project.

“And then I get a call telling me it’s over,” Therain says. “Then I’m like, what can we do? It’s either we start with another IP from the ground up, and so it’s going to take a lot more time, or I don’t know — find something, do something.”

The Sekai team was at a loss, and Therain recalls calling his wife crying in the lobby of a hotel in Tokyo.

“The dream is over. It’s over. It’s just over. And she’s like, ‘What? Why? What happened?’ So I tell her, ‘The author said no,’” Therain says. “And you can’t talk to the author. You can’t get an audience with him. Once he says no, goodbye. And she’s like, ‘That’s great news!’ I’m like, ‘What didn’t you understand? The author said no.’ And she reminded me that the entire adventure was under the, let’s say the protection of Naruto, and our motto as a company was ‘Live your own shonen adventure’ or ‘Live like a shonen,’ which literally means when something goes bad, just fight for it.’”

The rain says his wife inspired him to keep trying and “so I just went home, and I wrote a letter to the author of ‘Naruto,’ not knowing if he would get it or read it or anything, I just put it on paper.”

“Because that’s what Naruto does. Naruto is famous for what we call talk no jutsu, which is literally the power of words,” Therain says. “And so, whenever he beats an enemy, it’s never with his fists. It’s after they exhausted all the weaponry and the magic and all this stuff. That’s when they start talking, and he turns the bad guy into a good guy because in ‘Naruto,’ no bad guy is bad entirely. You can turn anything into anything else. So I wrote on paper what ‘Naruto’ meant to me, every reason why I loved him, and how he changed my life, how he was there all the time, every time. And I ended it with [a part] which was exactly like Naruto: “I don’t know if you’re going to say like ‘Sorry, yeah,’ but no matter what happens, basically I will try again and again and again. Akiramenai, I will never give up because this is my ninja way. And this is what you taught me with ‘Naruto,’ Sensei.’”

The rain says he can’t disclose what exactly happened from there, but notes that after he sent the letter to TV Tokyo, the deal was approved by “Naruto” author Masashi Kishimoto.

“It was a beautiful loop, in a way, because I was in this moment where everything seemed lost, and I felt like Naruto, and I was listening to the music and I was crying because I was like, this is just reality matching with the dream,” Therain says. “So after that, the dream came true, basically.”

“Until the end of this year, it’s mainly two things: product iterations, to bringing more and more and more. On Discord, we have almost 1,410 people, and we’re known to reply to everyone to take into account what they ask for, to steer the product into the direction of what people really want, so there’s a lot of product shipping,” Therain says. “Obviously, we’re shipping a new set of cards every three months, and that’s a lot of work. So shipping more cards so that more people see their favorite characters that they can have, and they and they are happy about that. And then communication.”

The next part of the plan is “doing more stuff around ‘Naruto’ because our IP deal covers more.”

“So one of them is live events in stadiums like no one has ever seen before, and so we’re already working on that with people from Hollywood and backers,” Therain says. “But we really want to create events that will feel to people after they participated in these events that they can’t go to any other type of event ever again. We call that the ‘Super Bowl of Anime.’ So we really, really want to bring the epicness that we feel when we watch a Naruto fight to a real live stage, and that obviously involves pyrotechnic effects, holograms, and things like that. That’s very important to us.”