Dartz's History
Ten thousand years ago, Atlantis, an island that was isolated from the rest of the world, was a perfect civilization. One day, however, meteors rained down upon the kingdom. Those meteorites were mysterious and powerful Stones of the Orichalcos, and glowed a bright greenish blue. Those stones imbued the people of Atlantis with ultimate knowledge and power. In just a few years, Atlantis became the most advanced civilization on the planet, and was even more advanced than the modern world. However, with power came corruption and greed.
Ironheart, the King of Atlantis, gave his throne to his son, Dartz. Soon, the stones of the Orichalcos began to expose the evil in people, and turned those with darkness on the inside into monsters on the outside. Dartz witnessed his own wife, Iona, become a horrid, ugly beast. (In the Japanese version, she attacked him and he was forced to kill her with his sword.)
Confused and frightened, Dartz consulted a stone of the Orichalcos for guidance. The Orichalcos granted Dartz great power and lent him the Orichalcos Soldiers to do his bidding. It told him to resurrect an ancient mystical beast known as the Great Leviathan, which would help him to destroy the world and create a new one that would be free of evil. Dartz became corrupted and misguided.
Ironheart and Chris, (Dartz's daughter) fled and called upon the world of Duel Monsters and its guardians, the three Legendary Dragons (in actuality, three soldiers whom Dartz had transformed into dragons) for help against the corrupted Dartz. One day, an army of benevolent magical creatures—including the three dragons—led by Ironheart, met with Dartz’s Army of the Orichalcos Soldiers and the Great Leviathan, and the Battle of Atlantis took place. The battle concluded with neither side victorious: The three dragons were frozen in ice, the magical creatures were sent back to their own world, the Soldiers of the Orichalcos were destroyed, the Great Leviathan was sealed away from the world, and Atlantis sank beneath the sea.
The corruption of the Orichalcos made Dartz believe that the world was a wicked place, and that humans had an inherent malice in their hearts. The transformation that the Orichalcos had inflicted on his fellow Atlanteans was, he believed, the punishment for being evil, as the outside of man became as twisted as their inside.[1] Dartz was driven to revive the Great Leviathan to raze the world, so that he may reconstruct it in the image of glorious Atlantis. To do so, Dartz required souls of humans.
Dartz wandered the Earth for 10,000 years, presumably kept alive by the power of the Orichalcos. He knew that he had found one of the powerful souls that he required when he encountered the Pharaoh Atem in ancient Egypt, and witnessed his control of the powers of darkness and his ability to command Duel Monsters. He also witnessed the Pharaoh, with Slifer the Sky Dragon pursuing Thief King Bakura and Diabound. However, Dartz could not capture the Pharaoh's soul because Bakura and Zorc Necrophades were in his way (though Dartz seems to not have any fear of Zorc and when he showed the past of the Pharaoh (his first battle with Bakura); Dartz never saw Zorc as a threat to the Great Leviathan, likely believing the powers of the Leviathan were greater than those of Zorc). He therefore had to wait another 5000 years (3000 in the Japanese version) to capture the Pharaoh's soul.[2]
It was unclear precisely when Dartz began to collect souls, but eventually, he established a multinational conglomerate that was named Paradius, which became a well-known, yet mysterious force in the business world. But that was not the only organization that Dartz had formed. Dartz also controlled the Doma Organization (Paradius in the English version), a group formed to gather souls to feed the Great Leviathan by challenging unsuspecting players to games of Duel Monsters only to have their souls taken by "The Seal of Orichalcos", a card that he had suffused with the Orichalcos' power.
For ten thousand years, Dartz collected souls in order to ensure the return of the Great Leviathan into the world. With time, the number of souls that Dartz had stolen stretched into the millions, thanks in part to his underlings.Dartz's underlings, Rafael, Valon, and Alister, a trio of Duel Monsters players (called Doma's Three Swordsmen in Japan) had their lives manipulated by him to make them feel only hatred, and molded them to be ideal servants to his cause. Dartz gave them each a small fragment of the Orichalcos, which could be used to break the "Seal of Orichalcos" from outside in case of emergency, and gave them magical abilities that rivaled the Millennium Items.
Once aware of the fact that the Pharaoh had been reincarnated and his spirit revived in the present day, Dartz began his agenda to take his soul by freezing over the Tablet of Memories, and prevented the Pharaoh from remembering his own past. Later, he ordered his minions to steal the Egyptian God Cards. Subsequently, the Dark Magician Girl had Yugi Muto, Seto Kaiba, and Joey Wheeler release and join forces with the Legendary Dragons as the souls of both them and their friends came under threat. Dartz's surviving family, Ironheart and Chris assisted Yami in recovering his self-confidence and the trust of "Timaeus". Events gradually converged on a Duel between Yami Yugi, Kaiba, and Dartz, in which Yami Yugi claimed victory by releasing the power of the Legendary Dragons and returned them to their human forms. Kaiba, Joey, and Yugi's souls were emancipated from the clutches of the Leviathan.
However, Dartz sacrificed his own soul, and his human body was reduced to dust, to give Leviathan enough power to fully resurrect and raised Atlantis once more with himself combined with the Great Beast. In the ensuing battle, Yami Yugi called the Egyptian Gods and together they destroyed it, and discharged all of the souls. However, a trace of its darkness remained, and revealed the Leviathan's original form, along with Dartz's soul, which Yami Yugi was able to banish, released Dartz from the influence of the Orichalcos, allowed him to be reunited with the spirits of his family, and entered the afterlife as Atlantis sank back beneath the sea.
