Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 270: Video Game Apparel

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Since the dawn of the medium, humans across the globe dreamed of wearing video game representation on their bodies—a practice that's only become commonplace in recent years. We've come a long way since the days of too-large or too-small pre-order t-shirts as the rare video game wearable, to the point where just about any character or logo can be found emblazoned on a well-fitted shirt, hat, or the odd pair of parachute pants. On this episode of Retronauts, special guest Nina Matsumoto of Fangamer joins us to talk about her career designing video game apparel, and to also help us trace the poorly documented history of the subject. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

This week on Retronauts, it's Ongo like Congo Bongo. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey, in today's topic is what I'm calling video game wearables, video game items you place on or around your body that are often, you know, approved by the game makers themselves.

I'm disappointed. I thought this was going to be video game edibles and... No, no. I thought there were going to be treats. No, no. That's a whole... Actually, that's a good topic for another day. I'll have to write that down. Those vile jelly suckers from the early odds. I don't want to talk about it because I'd sell those to children who were immediately disappointed.

Who just talked? Who is this? It's me, Jeremy Parrish. Here to let you know. know that the cake is in fact a lie. Ooh, I have not heard that one. That's an old neat slapper from the late odds. From the aughts. Yeah, the funniest decade on record. And who is our special guest, a master of merch herself?

Hey, hey, it's Nina Matsumoto, and I could be in your closet right now. Wow, she's small folks. She can crawl up in there and drop down like a ninja. At least that's what it said in the U.S. Gamer article about me when they interviewed me a few months ago. The diminutive Nina Matsumoto. What does that mean? Tiny. Oh.

In other words. I don't know. That makes me think of burn after reading and Brad Pitt in the closet, which is very, very sad. You don't want that end for yourself. No. So we talk a lot about video game-related topics, not just video games and retronauts. And I don't think we've ever done an episode on video game apparel. Ray did an episode a little similar to this.

Pocket episode 18 was about Nintendo merch, and I think we might have covered a few shirts, maybe a few pajamas or something like that. But this time we'll be focusing on the world and the history of video game wearables. It's what I'm calling it. No one uses the word apparel. There's not a real good word for it. We use the word apparel, fan gamer. It's like a 19th century word. That's high end.

Yeah. Poetty toadie over there. You can see it. In a good way. That's fine. Fashion. But yes, Nina, in case you don't know, we're going to be talking a lot to Nina. Part of this podcast will be an interview with Nina because not only is Nina an Eisner

award-winning comic artist, she's also a designer for fan gamer. Fangaber.com, they make our t-shirts when we distribute them, and they've made Jeremy's books, of course. They printed those. And Nina does a lot of great designs for them. Yeah, I've always always liked t-shirts and cool graphic t-shirts. And I never really thought about pursuing a career in it. But somehow I managed to fall into this. And now it's like the thing I do the most and the thing people approach me the most about, actually. So before we dig deeper into the topic, I wanted to ask everybody here, gathered here for this episode, a few questions to warm us up. So the first question is, this will tie into our history segment later, is what is the first piece of video game apparel you ever wore? Can you remember what that was? Jeremy, how about you? You're asking about prehistory here. Prehistory.

Back in the neolithic age. Yeah, no, I actually very clearly remember my first piece. of video game apparel because it was I really loved it when I was a kid. It was a centipede shirt. It was a ringer tea. It was a dark blue tea with green sleeves and then had

the sewn on like bands onto the green sleeves. And the shirt was basically like a kind of semi-metallic, you know, ish iron on transfer kind of thing because this was the age. This was the early 80s, the age of iron

transfers. Oh, so it was not a purchase shirt, it was an iron on. No, it was a purchase shirt. It just had the look of an iron on transfer, except it actually stayed on and didn't wear off after a couple of washes. But I loved that shirt and wore it as often as I could. Were you a Senepeed fan or did your parents peg U.S. One? No, I liked Sinepeed. It's, you know, it's a very accessible game. It's, you know, if you're six or seven years old, you can walk up to the game and immediately suss how to play it. You may not do very well, but you'll get it. Or just spin the track ball for fun. Yeah, I mean, and you know, you start to make the connections. in your tiny child mind that as I spin the track ball,

the thing on screen moves. It teaches you that DDT is good. It's a good chemical we should all use. Oh, right, okay. DDT was an all-organic sort of kill them all game. Yes, that's right. So, okay, so cool. So you had an iron-on-style centipede shirt.

Nina, can you remember what the first video game, a clothing item, socks, a shirt, a pin, a hat. What was it for you? Well, first I want to ask, because anyone done a matchup of centipede and human centipede and put it on a t-shirt. Oh. Hey, let's not do this.

that. What's that? What if we avoided that? If no one's done that, hey, there's an idea for you. All right. Ben Gamer, you're on it. I don't know if that site still exists, but there's a site that used to exist called T-shirt Hell, and it was like, here are the most offensive t-shirts we could ever print, and you'll probably get beaten in public if you wear it. You know, the thing is, Atari is just like, they're horrors. They will just license out anything. So if you went to them and said, I'd like to do this. Can I please show the centipede like sewn mouth to ass? And they'd be like, oh, whatever, just give us money. I think the best time for that would have been 10 years ago.

They really, whoever is out there manufacturing t-shirts, fangamer could have made that t-shirts. I once made a human contrapede. I didn't put on a t-shirt, though. Where'd you put it? It was on Twitter, like years ago. Let's not talk about that. Oh, geez.

Dark secrets are coming out. Okay, wait, did you answer the question, Nina? I'm not just distracted by these disgusting images now. Now I'm just thinking of human centipede matchups. I'm sorry. Yeah, I had to actually think hard about this. question because I couldn't remember what my first video game apparel was, mostly because growing up, I didn't see a whole lot of video game merchandise, and even if I saw some

stuff, usually there wasn't anything for women to wear. And like you were talking, I am very diminutive. You couldn't find, like, footy pajamas? No, I need, like, women's sizes that are smaller for my frame and usually geek t-shirts were enormous and the smallest size I could find was like a medium-unisex and that wouldn't do. And even if I could find geek shirts aimed towards girls or women, it was usually pink and had some kind of female character on it and some kind of stupid phrase like fight like a girl or whatever. So I think I think the first video game sure I had wasn't even like official. It was one of those like

inspired by a video game shirt and it was from threadless and I didn't realize it was a video game shirt actually. It's a very famous design called the Manus of Mission 6. It's on a Navy T and it features a yellow astronaut who's just taken a bunch of anxiety pills

and he's cowering under some ghost astronauts with skull faces and I bought it because I was being into threadless at the time and I just thought it was a cool design But then one day someone went, hey, he's that a Pac-Man shirt? And that's when I realized for every first time, oh, yeah, it is meant to be Pac-Man depicted as, like, astronauts. And the guy, the main astronaut at the front, he's wearing a helmet that clearly, I guess not clearly enough.

But if you look closely, his helmet is basically Pac-Man. But there is like a human face under there. So I think I just didn't realize what it was meant to be, especially with that name, the Man is of Mission Six. Does Mission Six refer to anything to Pac-Man? I don't think so. There are no missions in Pac-Man. There are boards. I am familiar with the shirt, though.

Yeah, it's super famous. So I think that's the first video game-based T-shirt. Interesting. All these answers are going to come up in our history segment later. So mine was an iron on. My first T-shirt was an iron on. It was an image of Bowser from Super Mario Brothers and the Nintendo Power logo above him. And my mom ironed that onto a white T-shirt.

And that was essentially my first video game T-shirt. know where she got it. It was not like a bootleg thing, but it was just like a very clip-arty design, and it was an iron-on for sure. And I think it fell apart after like four washes. Yeah, those were garbage. They were really bad, but I was so happy because I love Nintendo Power and I love Mario. And those come up in history later, but I could not find Mario shirts anywhere, like video game shirts. So just having something with a Mario character and Nintendo Power on it, I wore it with pride. Yeah, I feel like after kind of my young childhood, video game apparel became a lot more scarce. Like I was a kid in elementary

school sort of during the golden age of the arcade where Pac-Man fever and Donkey Kong mania were all the rage and those cartoons were on television. And so there was a lot of merchandise just out in the market. But then after, you know, the mid-80s, it kind of dried up and it became much more just like very rare specialty items, mostly around Mario. But even then it was more like here's a sleeping bag where here's like a wall sticker as opposed to. Hey, here's a shirt you can wear it with Mario on. Yeah, the second wave of merch for video games didn't really hit until the early 2000s. We'll talk about that in a bit.

So I have a few more questions to go through before we talked to Nina about her career and her job making shirts and other things. So my second question is, what has been your favorite piece of video game apparel you've ever owned or worn, hopefully both? Jeremy, how about you? I mean, honestly, that Senate Beach shirt was pretty banging. It was great. You were in the games press for like almost 20 years, right? So many things must have passed through your hands. I don't think any freebie t-shirt that I received as a mailing, like a PR mailing,

made me say, oh, I want to wear this. You don't enjoy a formless Excel t-shirt with a game logo on it? Yeah, I occasionally wore some of the shirts, but it wasn't like a point of pride or anything. I actually really liked the illusion of Gaya T-shirt that came packed in with the game, just because it wasn't a great shirt. It was just the logo. And no one knew what it was. It was a bribe to get you to buy an RPG in 1994.

But it was just like so weird, like packing a t-shirt with a video game. Like that's very random. You didn't see a whole... Actually, I think that might be the only instance that I can think of. And just the idea of like, hey, we're going to ship this thing to people. Hopefully it's the right size for them. I think it was like an extra large t-shirt. So it was in the 90s.

So it was fine for me to wear something that... draped on me like a tent. But, yeah, it was just such a random choice. The economy was booming in the 90s. We just covered an extra fabric to... I guess. Nintendo was just like, we've got to make these kids like RPGs somehow. I know.

It made the box bigger. Let's give them a large box with a t-shirt inside. So, Jeremy said, Illusion of Guy a T-shirt. Nina, favorite piece of apparel, video game apparel, that you've owned or worn or both. Two things came to mind immediately. I actually don't own any of the... these. But they came out recently. One of them, so there's a Japanese company called Hardcore Chocolate, their hard CC on Twitter if you want to see their stuff. They make some, like,

cool kind of like horror-looking stuff based on like 80s pop culture. And they recently released official merchandise for Takeshi's Challenge. It's the black and white version of the image they used for like the ad for the game. And I just love anything based on obscure video games like that, and Taikishi's challenge is a pretty deep cut. Plus, you know, Taikishi's challenge in general is such a cool part of, like, weird gaming history that I really wanted that shirt. Unfortunately, T-shirts in Japan are super, super expensive for some reason. Yeah, I bought plenty of like 4,000 yen t-shirts in Japan.

Probably, yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, sometimes I'll see, like, a cool graphic tea in Japan. It's just, you know, like one color printed with plastic-y stuff, on like, just, a Fruit of Loom shirt, and it'd be like 7,000 yen, and I don't know why it's like that there. Yeah, Uniclo is a unique value proposition over there because you can buy a shirt for like 1500 yen as opposed to

10 times that. When we went King of, what does it call? King of Games. Yeah. That's like Versace prices for Fruit of Loom. I saw a little mini documentary about King of Games ones, and once I saw it, I understood why their T-shirts cost so much, it's

because they hand screen print each one. They don't have a machine that does it. Did you really get a machine? I think it will help out. Yes, automation is a marble. It does so many things these days. Uniclo come up later in our discussion, but when we went last year to Japan, Jeremy, they were having their Shonen Jump merch, a line of merch for the 50th anniversary,

and the shirts were 900 yen, which is like cheaper than you can get them for here. So a really great deal. This is also, we're not taking sponsors right now for, you know, big brands like Uniclo, but hey, I'll take an offer code. Hang, it was not sponsoring this either, by the way. So the other piece of merch I really, really like, which I don't have, is it's not a T-shirt, it's actually a pair of shoes. I wish they were more video game shoes, but I know that's having to deal with all the sizes and shipping and all that makes it way harder to produce and, you know, sell. But Sega released some Fantasy Zone shoes through a slip-on shoe company in Japan called Anipon.

So they're slip-ons, and it's like an all-over print of the game screen from Fantasy Zone. and the box it comes in has the opening screen on the lid and I love Fantasy Zone so much I rarely see merchandise for it I don't see T-shirts for every often I think King of Games had a shirt like once and that's it

and the shoes are just so colorful and cute and I wish I had them Okay actually I need to change my answer Go for it, I'll allow it The Converse All-Star Super Mario Brothers shoes The World One One shoes They're just like that beautiful sky blue That's not accurate but it's beautiful

Yeah, it's better than the original. Yeah, and I had those shoes, and I loved them, and I had to sell them off to be able to move out of San Francisco. I recall you wearing those at one-up, right? Yeah, I love them. They were so great. Who's buying Use Converse All-Stars? They kind of, like, just fall apart, right? No, it's not like I wore them a lot, so they were in great shape when I sold them.

But, yeah, I sold them to someone just, like, met them at the bar station was like, here you go. I just, you know, they paid the value for them. I think he was a... I imagine them being your only person. pair of shoes and you had to take them off your feet. He was just collecting shoes from famous games journalist for his voodoo dolls. No, he said he wanted it for like a Halloween

costume or something. I'm like, I don't know what Halloween costume that would be, but... Dressing up as a game journalist. Thank you for the money. Yeah, right. Dressing up as Jeremy Parrish. First, you need shabby clothes but really nice shoes because you can't afford to outfit yourself with everything. So as for me, this will come up later again. I got to quit saying that because everything will come

later, but my favorite things that I had were not even super interesting, but it was the fact that I was able to get them is what made them interesting. So number one, favorite thing that I've worn, it's not even stylish. I wouldn't wear it today, but I kept it for a very long time. It was the Cloudstrived T-shirt I got for pre-ordering Final Fantasy 7 in 1997 because I had never seen a Final Fantasy shirt before. I never assumed one would exist. I didn't think anyone cared about Final Fantasy, but when I pre-ordered the game before I even got a PlayStation that summer, I was just thrown a

t-shirt, and it was just a white t-shirt. It had Final Fantasy 7's logo like over over the breast, and on the back it had Cloud in his famous, like, just regular stock art pose with basically his blood type, his name, his age, blah, but I was like, oh, my God, I can wear a Final Fantasy shirt, and that was a special moment in my life.

I like that it had his blood type. That's so Japanese. It's important. We need to know this. Was it O? I bet it's O. I think I thought it was like A.B. or something. I don't know. Jeremy. I don't have that memorized. You should know these things. I'm not Japanese. Sorry. I'm sure we can look this up. I'm sure that'll be three comments after. Immediately

after I asked the question. I could do an episode about video game character blood types. Ooh. They're almost all on record, although I tried to find Pac-Man's blood type the other day. Not known. Not known yet.

Pac-Man doesn't have blood. No. It's more of a viscous oil. It's true. I guess you need blood to have a blood type. The other thing I remember is, when all the video is bad, so in the early, and the early 2000s when all video game merchandise was bad, and just very ugly, too many words on it, too many bad jokes. I was buying a lot of vintage clothing because I was that sort

of hipster as a late teen, early 20 year old person. And I found an amazing Pac-Man t-shirt that definitely was an iron on. Like someone had ironed it onto a t-shirt, but it was like this very thick plastic print screen. What's like, what's it? Plastisol. There you go. And it was sparkly. It had like sparklies on it too. It was like there was like glitter baked into the design. And it was like the Pac-Man that looked like a sort of like a footy-pajama creature. And it was so great. I wore that until it- Like the old Namco cabinet art.

Yeah. It's kind of like a... Red eyes. Yeah, he kind of looks like a diode almost. But then with footy pajamas. Yes. And he was like doing his famous like, you know, Pac-Man has feet running across the screen sort of thing with the Pac-Man logo. Really good.

I wore that shirt until it exploded in my washing machine like 15 years later. Oh, I would love a T-shirt with a Pac-Man from Pac-Man 2. you on it? Were he's doing that smug walk? Oh, yeah. The haters got a hate walk? Yes. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, anything with, anything with like off-model merchandise or off-model characters is what I love. So, yeah, that's the next question is, before we go on to Nina's interview here, is what piece of video game apparel do you wish you could will into existence? I will say, for me, we talked about it in the Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom episode with Nina about a year ago. I would still love anything from that game. I want the most obscure thing on my body to wear.

period. That's what I'm all about. But secondly, because I have these figurines, I would love to see older versions of Nintendo characters represented in arts, sorry, represented on clothing, like the Mario Brothers designs from the arcade games on a T-shirt,

or, you know, famous old Yoshi with a saddle and the half-lid look and the tiny arms, like any sort of older version of the characters I love because it's more obscure and less people will get it. So I have pride wearing it. That's interesting. It seems like we both like obscure stuff.

Is it because we're just showing off? We're huge snobs and hard to get along with. Yeah, it's like I don't want to wear Mario shirt or Pac-Man shirt, but if it was of their first designs, then we're talking. I'll wear my Jumpman shirt. So I guess that's my answer. I'm sure there's more, like, I don't see a lot of, I haven't seen a lot of merchandise for games I thought had like a cult appeal here,

like Dangan Rampa, like no one got the license. And I think that chip had sailed. And I remember talking to the director of the game. And that was one of the things I asked him. I was like, can you make it so there's merch in America? And he's like, oh, there's not merch here for the game? I'm like, no, I can't find a T-shirt or anything. Yeah, you got me a T-shirt.

Yeah, I was going to say it. But that was a T-shirt for the anime series. Oh, okay. How do you tell? Because of the type, it's like Dangan Rampa 3, Harmony, despair, or whatever. It's different than Dagonerampa V3, which is the game. But it still has Monakuma's head on it, which is cool. Does Monica Kuma look different?

No, no. But the difference is it's a. merch for the anime, not the game. So I still have not seen merch for the games outside of a Comic-Con where they were selling like clear files and pins of characters. And I paid someone on Twitter to send me those.

So that's basically all I've seen. And they're just imported from Japan. So that is my answer. Nina, what do you want to see Wilden 2 existence knowing that you have no power at Fan Gamer to make things happen? More Fantasy Zone stuff. I just want to see more Fantasy Zone. It's got

such nice colors and like Opo Opa is adorable. Like, I think Opa Opa is one of the most adorable characters ever created and you don't see anything with him on it. I think it would be good to see like all over Sublimation Print hoodie of Fantasy Zone just to like put, just stick the entire screen on there and I would totally wear that. I think it's just like anything with like bright, playful colors and shapes. That's why I think a Clax hoodie would be good too.

Oh, yeah. Like just take that cover with that weird hand on it. What's the hand doing? like walking or no it's just like a like a the black hand kind of it's like it's like a pink hand and it's just like got his finger stressed out but the thumb is down really low to an angle that you can't really do in real life it's not extended yeah it's really weird yeah just something like that um like yeah bold color choices from like the 80s and 90s um obscure stuff like Clacks,

maybe something even more obscure, like stuff that was the only release in Japan, like 53 stations with the Tokai-do. I don't know what it could do with that. Wait, what is it? 53 stations of the Tokai-do. What is that? I guess you could have like a map on the shirt

of like the 53 little points to travel to. Or just like take the main character, Kantoro, the sprite, and blow him up and put him on there. It's a really bad Famicom game where you're a little guy, you're a fireworks maker and he throws fireworks or they just look like bombs, basically. And you're running from, I think, Kyoto to Tokyo or the other way around.

I don't know. I can't really remember, but you're just running, and these are like these ninjas, whatever, chasing you. And it's, like, super, super hard. I only know about it because of Game Center CX, which, oh, I guess I also did shirt designs for Game Center CX, too. Maybe we could talk about that later. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So anything weird like that?

Super Monkey Dyboken. Oh, God, yeah, that would be great, too. Actually, there's another really cool video game t-shirt company I love in Japan called Games Glorious. And they do officially licensed shirts based on some of the more obscure Fabincom titles, like Wagan Land, Mappi, even things like Crazy Climber. They release a really cool Splatter House. What's it called Spatterhouse? Wondbuckoo Graffiti. Oh, I wish it was Montpacru Graffiti.

That's the version I want. Spotterhouse is not obscure enough for me. Yeah, I wouldn't call Spatterhouse obscure, but it's still cool that they release merchandise for it. They had like a hoodie and t-shirt for it. But yeah, I think I would rather wear the Wanpaku graffiti one. Oh, or maybe like Kid Dracula. That would be cool. That would be cool.

Konami does not make games anymore, but they do like, you know, rehashing their old licenses. So you never know what will happen. So, Jeremy, you're not really in the habit of wearing a lot of video game merch anymore, but is there something that you would like, something stylish you would like that you could wear and pull off? That does not exist yet. What are those jackets, the silk, like, bomber jackets with the embroidery on the back called? Sukajan, or you can just call them souvenir jackets? Yeah, I want one of those that has Mega Man I box art.

Oh, my God. On the back. I'd actually wear that. That would be terrible and wonderful. I do want more video game jackets, especially souvenir jackets, because I love them. But you don't see very many of those. And I think it's because souvenir jackets are really, really, really. expensive to make, all that embroidery.

The best one I've seen so far, it was like Ronma one half that I saw at Nakano Broadway last year. I was actually very tempted by that, but knew I probably wouldn't wear it. No, what I would actually get the most use out of is very small lapel pins of video game characters because I like wearing lapel pins in my jackets. I've seen you wear those. Yeah, they add a little bit of personality and it's a little like, you know, instead of wearing a video game character t-shirt, I just have like, you know, a one-inch.

little cloison A pin or whatever of a video game character. That would be okay by me. I don't see you pivoting to novelty ties any time soon. No, afraid not. Maybe novelty boat. I'm returning my piano keys tie gift of getting here for Christmas. I've seen a few classy video game themed neckties. Like if you go to the Skor Enoch store, they have one with like chokobos all over it and

Kuktar in a nice way. I have the fan gamer Octodad. Oh, yeah, that was fun to me. It's very subtle and it's nice. That is cool. I do like that. Calling, you hear the calling. You hear the calling.

So let me go grab it to want to my shoulder. Little by little I feel a bit bitter. Let me misset me feel a bit older. Just once in a while till the brush deep and find it once more. So next we're going to talk to Nina all about her career. So Nina has done so much, so many cool things. Game Center, CX, fan gamer, Simpsons Comics, recently sparks the graphic novel. The second one is coming out soon.

I do want to start with your comics career, Nina, because you sort of have a fan art background that brought you into the world of quote-unquote legitimate published works and, you know, license shirts and things like that. I'm not saying fan art is illegitimate, but there's a difference when you're giving permission and when you're not. Yeah, I know what I mean. Yeah, like I think I'm most known for my fan art. And even now, like even though I do official stuff for video games through a fan gamer, it feels like I'm doing fan art for a living, which is a great way to live. I've got to tell you. Yeah, so I used to draw a ton of fan art for fun.

Now it's for profit. I drew the Simpsons piece that was in my style, like a big group picture of like a bunch of the characters. And it was done in my style, which means it was more like anime style. And that went viral online. It was called the Simpsonsu. I'm sure if you look it up,

many people listening would be like, oh yeah, I've seen that round. Yeah, if you look it up, just like type in anime Simpsons, you'll see them all in the living room. a huge gathering of the characters. So that caught the attention of Bongo comics, and they published Simpsons comics. At the time, they were looking for someone to do artwork for the script they had calling

for a manga version of The Simpsons. And they couldn't find an artist who could, like, strike a good balance between anime or manga style and Simpsons' character designs, because that's a really bizarre mix. And they found my piece, and they contacted me and asked if I could do comics. And at the time, I've been doing a webcomic for a long time. So I just showed them that. And they were like, okay, cool. We can trust you with this job then.

And that was my first time being published, was doing the Simpsons manga. And then they saw that it could draw in the Simpsons style as well, like the house mat-graining style. So they hired me to do just regular stuff for them. So I drew for Simpsons Comics, Bart Simpson Comics, for 10 years until they unfortunately closed with, I think it was last year or a couple years ago. So I did that for 10 years. During that time, I also did my own original stuff. So I did this manga called Yo Kiden. There's two volumes of that. And I also did like little side jobs for indie anthologies. So for a long time, I was just doing comics. And, you know, I've always wanted to do comics for a living. So I was cool with that. But I also really, really wanted to do t-shirt designs. I didn't know how to break into that. Like, where do you even begin? I thought. An artist friend of mine, Miss Monster, she did some work for this. company called Meat Bun. They're still around. They're not as active anymore, but they would make video game

inspired fan t-shirts. They asked her if they know anyone who could do an Owen Dunn parody shirt. And there was a charity shirt for Giant Robot Magazine, which was in danger of being shuttered at the time. So they wanted to make this a t-shirt

in the Owen-Dun style of like the main editor for Giant Robot magazine, like calling for help. Because that's what You know, it was for us to help save Giant Robot Magazine. And she's like, oh, I know a person who could do this. Because at the time, I was doing a lot of, like, fun mashups. And I tend to draw in different kinds of styles.

Like, I'm good at mimicking styles. So that's what I was doing a lot of, and that's what I was getting attention online for. So they hired me to do that. And that was my first time doing a shirt design period. Although that's, even though it's for a video game apparel site, it wasn't a video game-based design because it was for a giant robot. But I guess I did a good enough job with that that they didn't hire me to do other things. Like, no, I did a Marri Cart shirt that's Donkey Kong writing in his card and it's like in the style of ratfink. Oh, awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. Or like I did like a Daytona USA Transformer in the style of the transformer box art. That was really hard to do. So, what year did you start with a t-shirt design? So that was, I believe that was 2011. So not that long ago. Almost a decade, though.

Almost a decade, yeah, it's coming up. So I did a few stuff for Meepun, and I guess that caught the attention of a fan gamer. And they hired me to do, in 2013, Fan Gamer, at the time, they were still mostly focusing on, like, unofficial video game inspired designs. They got me to do this Pygman-inspired.

design called Local Flora and that's um i think that's like a big fan favorite i mean like bob you said you had one of those too yeah i think i bought that at maybe packs 2014 before i even knew who you were i somehow gravitated towards your designs without you knowing you were the artist so that in the major's mass t-shirt right or the first like non-earthbound things i actually got from fan gamer i actually knew of fan gamer for a long time because i'm affiliated with this charity um charity gaming marathon group called the SpeedGamers. They're based in Texas. They've been doing charity gaming marathon streams before GameSton Quick. Actually, Gamestown Quick was inspired by them. They're not actually

speedrunners. Everyone thinks so are because they're... They're meth heads. They have no teeth. Now I've met them. They have nice teeth. You met one of them. Anyway, good teeth, though. The speed gamers and fangamer both launched on the same year. That was 2008. So they've been friends for a long time. They would collaborate. And so that's how I found about Fang Gamer. But then I didn't actually like become closely associated with them until I did that shirt. And then in 2013, I went to Portland Retro Gaming Expo. And I didn't, yeah. I didn't, I didn't know at the time, but Fan Gamer had a booth there. And I was like, oh, hey, it's me. I did

that, I did that shirt. They were selling the Pickman shirt. And so from there, like, I was able to talk to like John Kay who designs like a ton of their shirts one of the co one of the founders of FanGamer he was running the booth and I helped out at the booth because he was running it all by himself I'm like oh I can give you a hand then

because this seems like tough to like run a booth all by yourself there and I just became really friendly with him and he was actually the one who contacted me first to do a design he's the one who found me online so it was like it was a really really good like coincidence that I have to be there and Fangamor and Fan Gamer end

John were there too. So we got to, like, think about what I could do next. We were just, like, tossing ideas back and forth and, like, doing sketches and just collaborating that way, which is not something you get to do often, you know, working at home.

And from there, I just wanted to do more and more stuff for Fangammer until eventually they wanted to hire me full time as one of their house artists. And they're based in Tucson, but I work remotely from Vancouver. And at think I'm the only Canadian that works for them full time.

So FanGamer, they started off doing video game inspired merchandise, but they, in recent years, they've transitioned into doing official license merch. You've done official license merch for things like Silent Hill and persona and Bloodborn and all kinds of really cool things like that. What is it like working with a licensor, working with a publisher that has certain demands, like how much freedom are you given, what questions do you have to ask and so on? I think it's only recently that we started doing stuff for really big titles. Like you mentioned, Silent Hill, Persona, even done like Dark Souls,

and we started doing stuff for Capcom titles as well, like Okami. Were indie games really the first license licenses FanGamer did? Yes, I was going to mention that. So, like, first, you know, Fan Gamer started doing the unlicensed stuff and then indie games and then eventually transitioned into like the big name titles and publishers and companies. So working with indie devs is a lot easier, as you can imagine, because usually it's just like a tiny, tiny team or like say in the case of like Undertale or Starry Valley,

it's just one guy. So like if you can like talk to them directly or you know what they want or if you have an established relationship with them already, like in the case of Toby Fox and Fangamer, it's super easy. Like you just kind of like informally or casually email them or even just like text them and they'll be like oh yeah that sounds like a good idea or like oh here's this design we did what do you think they're like okay but when it comes to something

like persona or okami like as you can imagine there's like so many names involved and so many eyes the designs have to go through and lots of like different approvals well and even if like one person thinks a design is good maybe another person might be like no maybe we shouldn't do this like I don't know what kind of discussion has, discussions happen behind the scenes, but the approval process takes longer because of that. And, you know, it's like when it comes to video game merchandise, I feel like it's such a minor part of their job that they have to worry about, which is completely understandable. Like, of course, they want to focus on the games more than anything else. So, like, if they're busy working on other things, something like approving a T-shirt design is not something that happens. right away. It's understandable, but it can be frustrating on our end because that all we do

is a merchandise aspect. So, I mean, there are certain things you can't say, but I'm just wondering when you work with these publishers, do you find that you're actually working with the creators of the games, or are they separate entities at the company who are just like in charge of marketing? Do you ever get feedback from actual artists that worked on the games or, you know, the director or anything like that? Or do you just not know who's actually saying yes and no? Yeah, it really, really depends on the company and the title. You're right, I can't say too much about it, unfortunately. The A-P-Scape people were real bastards.

No, I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. I thought it was so, again, that's like another, like, that is so obscure and I love ApeAscape, so I got the AipScape Pina Pax. So A-Pescape merch is totally awesome. Yeah, no, it widely depends. Some companies, it feels like they hand the designs off or show the designs that we do to the actual dev teams of,

each of whatever title we're doing merchandise for. And with some companies, it's more like the people in charge of the company, not the games, that do the approvals. And I think that's really interesting. I wish I could say, like, which company does which, but I really

shouldn't go into that. It's okay. Do you find it's more productive when you actually get feedback from the actual game creators? Sometimes, yes, depends on how flexible the creator is. sometimes they're okay with like really creative interpretations of their characters like they're okay with like widely widely off model designs

some want you to be like completely on model which can be tough for us because fan gamer like at fan gamer we tend to do like different kinds of styles we don't just like take we don't want to just take the artwork the art assets of the game and slap it on a t-shirt like we kind of specialize and come up with our own artwork to put on shirts, something that works for t-shirt design. Yeah. Like, sometimes I think it's cool to put, just take like the logo or box art and slap it on a shirt.

Like, I think it works for some stuff, but it doesn't always work. Yeah, I mean, FanGamer was born out of the necessity to be creative because they couldn't just, you know, put a drawing of Mario on a shirt. They had to say, like, what evokes Mario enough that people will recognize it, but that wouldn't, you know, make Nintendo mad. Yeah, like selling Fanorama. prints or like fan merch is it's such a gray area fan gamer has always tried to like stay away from anything trademarked like when I started working from them you know that's when they did like unlicensed stuff inspired stuff and they would actually tell me like oh this looks too close to the actual design can you like changes up a bit yeah I had that with some of the video game maps

that I've I've printed through Van Gamer like I reproduced the game logos for like Metroid and Metal Gear by hand. And they were like, ah, that's a little too direct. Can you not do that? So I had to come up with logos that were evocative. Interesting. I did the original game logos, but not actually the trademarked logos. When I talked to, I believe, Reed from Fangamer back in 2011, so I've been sort of following them through their growth as a company. And I remember talking to him and saying, you know, do you ever get pushback from companies whose, you know, games are inspiring your merch. And he's like, well, we're at packs and Nintendo's right there and they could come over here if they wanted. But, you know, people within the company are saying,

you know, we like your stuff, but we're not the people in charge of merch. So it's really cool to see that, like, in the eight years since we had that conversation, eight plus years, they've been able to find these people at these companies who are willing to, you know, go with a company like Fan Gamer. Yeah, we would always do designs that were kind of evocative of the game. We were making stuff based on, but nothing super direct. So, like, the rules were, like, no trademark or copyrighted names or even just, like, phrases, like, titles. I see a lot of people who sell fan merch kind of try to skirt that by putting the Japanese titles or names and things. And that, I always find that's weird.

It's like, well, that's still copyrighting, you know. It's just in Japanese. Like, so we can't do that, obviously. you can't do like silhouettes of characters either I see you're actually Bob you're wearing a silhouette shirt right now of like the Dragon Quest 11 cast

It's an official t-shirt that you gave me but not for fan gamer No, no no no But yeah you can't like It's just a silhouette But you can't do like the silhouette of a character Like that's too close You can't draw it

You can't design anything that's in the style Like the official style of that game Like you can't copyright a style But if you're drawing the characters in the style that they're drawn in officially, like then you're just kind of, even if that's not your intent,

it could make it look like you're trying to pass it off as an official merchandise, and that's not good either. Or like certain symbols, like Fangamore has made a lot of like stuff with, that's something that looks like a Triforce, but it isn't. It's like...

You can't copyright a triangle, sir. But somehow, like, I guess Nintendo was able to copyright the Triforce. I don't know what the rules are behind that. I think if you, If it's just the three triangles together, that's just like a standard Buddhist symbol. Like, you can't trademark that. But if you start putting, like, the filigree and the leaves and stuff around it, then, yeah, that's where it gets.

I think it's, you know, using that image in conjunction with other imagery. Or if you use, like, the Zolidic colors, like if you make it golden triangles against the green background. This is a case for geometry court to decide. Who owns the triangle? Is it Nintendo? Is it the world? So, Nina, what pieces of merge do you think, like, you find the most artistically successful for you? Like, what have you made that you've been the most proud of?

It could be stuff that's not even available anymore. My favorite shirt design that I've done ever still is the Monster Mosh one from Crits, the Nekker Dancer. That is great, and that is still in print, right? I think I saw that recently. It recently got reprinted, actually. That's, like, I would say that's one of the most popular designs. Like, often devs who approach fangamer will use that as an example. of what kind of t-shirt they want.

And that's a design where a lot of people who don't even know what Kurtine the Nekrodancer is will buy the shirt because you just think it looks cool. And that's always something I try to try for. So I'm really proud of that design, especially because, like, Fangamara does give me a lot of art direction,

but that's, like, the first shirt where I drew it and it was just done right away. There was no notes from the devs, there were no notes from a fan gamer. It was exactly, it was like all me there. and it's like one of my most popular designs I'm really proud of it anything that's like

kind of metal tea inspired that I've done I like so there's that there's the Demon's Domain shirt that's from Demon's Crest that's official that's like super metal looking the Silent Hill 2 shirt with Mira the dog on it

it's based on the dog ending from Silent Hill 2 I can't believe they let me do that that's also like metal inspired like my first thought was to do like a really cute design of Mira when Fangamur got the South Hill license that was recently. Yeah, I wanted to do a cute design of Mira because I like doing Shibayunus because I used to own a Shiba Inu.

But I had just done... You know how evil they are. Yes. I had just done a cute Shibaynu shirt for Valhalla. So I was like, well, I don't want to, you know, step on my own toes here and have them overlap. So I was like, oh, I could just go the opposite direction and make it look really scary looking.

So I made this really hardcore bloody-looking shirt with Mira, the Shibayunu in it, controlling everything behind the scenes. So was you all along? Yes, I got the letter. I tend to do a lot of, like, the rock-inspired teas, or metal teas, but most recently I did a punk rock-inspired tea for Persona 5, and that's based on Rugi, and it's called Vulgar Boy. And it kind of went from more like a sex pistols vibe there, and I think that was really successful. That was really fun to do, so I want to do more stuff like that. I just like band t-shirts in general, so I like applying those ascetics to video game t-shirts. And I think a lot of people like those as well.

So knowing that you are not predicting what Fangammer will make or knowing that you don't have any will say and what they can make, what personally, like, what is your dream project or your dream license to get your hands on? Again, I'm going to go back to Fantasy Zone. I would love to make something for that. Give me a number two, though. I need a number two. Well, like, what would you want to see? I'm going to have to go back to Princess Tomato, but... I'm going to need a number two.

A number two, wow. Let's see, I said Dangan Rumpa. God, I'm trying to think. Okay, Star Tropic. There we go. I don't like playing Star Tropic, but I like the idea of Star Tropic. So if you could just make a t-shirt of Mike falling into a pit, that really sums up the entire game. One of my dream things was to do Sunset Writers' Merge, and we did it. ton of that. I can't believe we got the license to that. You guys filmed the mini

Western and you can watch that online or at the booth if you ever see their booth, the big booth at Cannes. Yes, and I was there too. I flew down to Tucson when they filmed the mini movie based on Susset Writers because they have this place called Old Tucson where they actually did film a lot of like old Westerns there. So they rented that out for a day and we hired actors and like stunt actors and yeah, if you go on YouTube and look it up, look up like fan gamers, sunset writers. And it was just an ad for our merchandise, but we managed to recreate the first boss battle

with Simon Greedwell. Yeah, the whole like, bury me with my money line and all that. Oh, God, yeah, like the bury me with my money wallet that we made for that is one of my favorite things we've ever made. It makes me think that Capcom must be sort of cool if they are fine with things like Demon's Crest or Sunset Riders? Sunset Riders. Oh, Konami.

What other Konami things have you done? Silent Hill, Sunset Riders. Snowboard Kids? Yeah. That was a big get, too. I forgot you had Snowboard Kids, yeah. Oh, yeah, I guess I was Hudson, huh? Yeah, it was.

Did you design a Snowboard Kids thing? I did not because I never play that game. I don't know much about it. And there were already other designers in Fangammer who were excited for it. So I just let them do their thing. You know, yeah, you're right, though. Like, I will say, I really like working with Konami. They're down for anything.

We'll just throw a really, we could throw a really obscure title like Sunset Writers and still work kids at them. And they were like, sure, you can do this. Yeah, I mean, even though, again, like, they, I think they're just willing to, like, okay, we have all these properties. Just do whatever you want with them because, like, we are not a game publisher anymore. So just have fun. It seems to me that people who work at Konami or at least the people who we're in contact with are big fans of obscure older titles like that. So they get excited when we bring up games like that. I think we've moved past the Fuck Konami movement of,

now that death straining is out, I think we've all moved past that as a society. So, yeah, hooray for Konami as a licensor. That's their best role right now. Oh, yeah, I should mention another big get that we got recently is Metal Gear Solid. And we released a whole line for Black Friday recently. And I got to do stuff, so many stuff things for it.

got to do like pins and a t-shirt and that is like that was my one of my dream projects and I can't believe got to do it there's another thing I want to do for Konami I just don't want to jinx anything so I don't want to name you know things that we might possibly do it's the goonies too right? Perotius okay so Perotius is something you're in touch with Konami give me a pentaro shirt and that's what I'm going to say on the air oh you know what would be cool is if we could do merchandise based on the Pachinko machines that Konami puts out. Oh, man, the extended canon of Castlevania in Metal Gear.

The Erotic Violence, T-shirt. Silent Hill, or Pyramidhead Talks. Wait, he talks? There's voice clips of it. You can watch it online. Does he say, like, give me your money or something? I think he does. I think he does.

He's all about punishing the player. Nothing's more punishing than Pachinko, I think. Pyramid Head 2000. Before we take our break, Neen, I do want to talk briefly. So this is the world of video game wearables, but you've recently had the chance to design game boxes, which is totally new for you. One of your first was Thimbleweed Park, correct, for the Ron Gilbert Adventure game?

You guys made the collector's edition of that through Fan Gamer. We made a physical box for that, and they used the key art that was, I think it was originally supposed to be just for, like, the e-shops, but then they liked my artwork so much that decided to use it for the box design as well. And that was a huge honor. And I did a key art for Duck Game, which is a game I really love. I should mention so Crypto the Necker Dancer

I'm glad I got to do stuff from them because the devs are based in Vancouver and that's where I'm from that's where I'm from still live to this day and also the guy who made Duck Game is from Vancouver as well I think originally from Saskatchewan but he lives in Vancouver now

it's just nice being able to like work with indie creators that are local to me and then like get to meet them at like things like packs or like Twitch Vancouver meetups and say hey I made that shirt you like or sometimes it'll come up to me like oh you're Nina you made that shirt with like and just be able to connect them that way it's fun because like I don't know like would you say I work in the video games industry it's kind of more

like video game adjacent I feel like it says video games industry as the games press is yeah yeah okay yeah that's good point I mean like we're kind of doing that now yeah I when when I was in the press, I always kind of said, I don't know if I'm really in the games industry when people said that, but kind of I was, I don't know. I think we're too humble. I think that's the problem. It's a transient. It's a transient role. We are the Shigir Miyamoto's of whatever this is. So it's like I work in the industry, but not for any one specific company.

I get to jump around and get to meet all kinds of people and interact with different dev teams and publishers, and I find it a blessing that I got to do that, without also having to deal with the stress of making a video game. You're like the tose of video game art. Just a contractor for hire for everyone. Working secretly. Yes, in the dark. To make all the good stuff.

Is there anything else you wanted to let us know about your career? Nina, we're going to wrap up before we go to our break. But anything else you could tease or anything else you want people to check out that you've done or maybe some pieces you find are underappreciated you want people to see? Yes. I wanted to mention one thing that I thought was really cool. I got to do that I can't believe exists still. It's the Bionic Commando shirt that I did.

Oh my God, yeah, you did that, and I like how it's censored on the website. Yes. So I was asked to do something for Bionic Commando, and I'm not very familiar with the game. So all I could think about was the famous ending where Master D's head blows up. And I was trying to think of shirt design featuring, I guess, is that a name, Rad Spencer? Ladd, Spencer? Which one is it? Take your pick. Spencer. Whatever your feelings. Captain Ladd in the NES ending, but I think that's accepted as a mistransliteration.

Okay, yeah. Well, yeah, I want to do something with the Bionic Commando from Bionic Commando. But all I can think about was the exploding head. And I asked our licensing director, like, if it's okay, if I do the shirt based on that, make it all, like, gory, but in a cool sort of way, sort of like a horror T-shirt or like a metal. band t-shirt and he said hey go for it so i did and then we sent it in and capcom went uh can you explain why you chose to depict this on the t-shirt it's like a personality test yeah and i thought i was in trouble or something and i said well it's a very iconic moment in the game that a lot of fans remember and then he went okay i'm like oh all right so we did it and now it's the first censored t-shirt on fan gamer ever you have to pass an age gate to get through and do a captcha you

You just have to agree to see an exploding head. Find all of the stoplights in a picture first. I wish, man. But yes, thank you so much, Nina, for letting us know all about your great career. We're going to come back after the break to talk about the loose history of video game merch and then talk about some of your questions and comments about this subject. I can make me dream of bliss. Freedom in mind and nothing is so right.

It's compressed in the stomach space. You can't amaze me more and forever. I can't believe this is a dream. My looks is all this fading bright. I can't believe it was a truth. So I'd like to read as I myself. Let's go out and have so far away Have you ever seen such a birthday

What's in your mind? Let's do it one by one Have you ever thought such a day would come Time is up my death at your dream Start up the brand new story Straight up my bird is showing This is the day my mind So we're back from the break my life go

So we're back from the break and for this podcast about video game wearables I did want to develop a very loose history of video game apparel because there's no definitive source on how this all happened and how it changed throughout the decades but I really wanted to go on what my perspective was and ask you folks in the room what your perspective was as well and I do want to hear from people in the audience what did you encounter because I think my perspective is pretty legit at least from what I saw and from what like my friends and I experienced growing up

so I want to focus on America so number one if you're from another country this is all about American merch and I really think the first movement of merch began by being attached to big brands with big characters like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, like just going through thrift stores and flea markets and things like that. I see a lot of things related to these characters, and they're not necessarily all for children. It's wild to think that there was a time where it was hard to find even Mario

merchandise, like Mario T-shirts, because now you kind of see them everywhere, like Walmart and Target. It's true, yeah. Actually, I see more kids wearing Mario T-shirts now than I ever saw when I was actually growing up and wanting to wear Mario T-shirts. I hope you asked them if they've ever actually played a Mario game. I start quizzing them. Yeah, yeah. Make sure they're not fake gaming kids. I made them all cry and, yeah, their parents were not happy about it.

So, yeah, unfortunately it'd be a long time before licensers would be reined in with how, you know, they could interpret these designs. So a lot of this merch is often weird and ugly and has very different interpretations of the characters, especially with something like Pac-Man or even the publisher had no idea how to draw Pac-Man or what to do with the circle and turn them into an anthropomorphic creature. So this era you would see all kinds of funky Donkey Kongs, all sort of funky Pac-Mans. But there's sort of charm to that, I think, in that any licenser could have their own take and sort of get away with it as long as it resembled the original creation enough. So instead of just taking the video game art assets and putting on stuff, they would make their own artwork for it, but then try to match the style?

Pretty much, yeah. I mean, there was very little art to be had, I guess, in that era outside of like the arcade cabinet artwork. and who even knows if they're provided with that. Anything big enough to actually use on a t-shirt, I guess. Yeah. There were no, like, character designs or, like, people were not making promotional arts to, like, sent to magazines or whatever. It was all just a very rudimentary stuff.

I mean, back then, magazines had the, they employed artists full time. You could make a living, drawing paintings of video game characters. That's how Francis Mao made his millions. It was a wild, wild time. Yeah, off-model was very much. the nature of the game back then. I remember my brother had one of those Donkey Kong Jr. plush dolls that was, like, horrible.

It was like a soft-bodied Donkey Kong Jr. kind of chimpanzee, but then it had a hard plastic face and a hard plastic hands, and it could, like, suck its thumb, and it held a banana. Okay. It was weird. Those dolls? It was a wild time.

Those soft dolls with the diamond-hard faces really made effective weapons as a kid. Yes, because they were so floppy. you could get some really good momentum with them and then smack into someone. It was like a flail or something. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, like I encourage everyone

to go to these retro gaming conventions and just see like the many different versions of these characters. Like I feel like Pac-Man was the more popular character amongst non-children just because there is something childish about a giant cartoony monkey, but I still have seen lots of Donkey Kong merch not just for children.

Pac-Man in general is just a very stylish design. It's minimal and that's cool these days. so yeah that was the first real phase of merch from my perspective this is basically like stuff that happened right before I was born and as I was just becoming a toddler entering like my very early years so arcades declined and we are now in the rise of consoles especially the NES video games were mainly associated with children especially boys if you go back to our episode about video game commercials you'll see how the marketing changed and the commercials were often the dads were in them a little bit for a time but it was always a

the dads and the boys, and maybe the mom, like, peeking in from the kitchen saying, you know, oh, you men while she goes off to make whatever fluff for another sandwich is. We are in the area of the NES, and this is when I was growing up and really wanted to wear Mario T-shirts and, you know, wear a Zelda T-shirts and find any sort of video game apparel, you know, for a lot of people, there were no shortage of these items, but usually only of the most popular brands like Mario and Zelda. But still, from my experience, it was much more easy to see a Ninja Turer. shirt or a Simpson shirt or a Spider-Man shirt or a sports team shirt than it ever was to see a Mario or a Zelda shirt.

I know they existed, but I feel like they were things you had to, you know, order from the Sears catalog or something or the JCPenny catalog. Yeah, I find that to be so bizarre. Why didn't they cash in on video game stuff back then? I mean, it was certainly popular enough that they could have done that. Is it because gamers were considered, like, the lowest tier of geeks? I think you just didn't see as many character or property-oriented T-shirts back then as you do now. Like you would have, you know, it was really, I think, the Simpsons, Bart Simpson, and, you know, that early kind of rush to market. Yeah, Ninja Turtle Simpsons.

Like, even more, like even TM&T, there weren't that many T-shirts art that I can recall. But Bart Simpson, yeah, it was, you know, like this kind of punchy character. You could put a little quip next to them, very simple art that rebrand. produced well. So that was kind of like the explosion, I think, in my perspective and memory of character-driven T-shirts. But before that, you didn't see a lot. Like, you would see Garfield or Bloom County or something.

Yeah, Garfield for sure. Yeah. He owned the 80s. I guess they were always character-driven instead of just putting the title logo on a T-shirt and selling that. Like, you see a lot of that nowadays. And I think with video games, they should have done more of that because a lot of video game title logo designs are really, really cool.

I mean, that's what Fang Ever did for Crystallus or Crystallus or however you want to pronounce it. We just took the title vectorized in and put it on a shirt because it's so cool looking. I feel like they could have done more of that back then. It would have sold just fine. Yeah, there were big merch pushes for Nintendo stuff. And I mean, Nintendo was the only merch game in town. Even when Sega Genesis was huge, like when Sonic broke, you would see Sonic stuff,

but you would not see like Streets of Rage merch or what's another big Sega game, a Shinobi or anything? fantasy star yeah you would not see it was mainly just like the sonic game but um yeah like there were big merch pushes for nes stuff like coloring books and sticker books and candy and mac and cheese and things like that but i feel like uh the actual clothing was a very low priority item for uh for licensers and i really don't know why yeah when when that um illusion of guy a shirt shipped with the game it was novel because like you just didn't see video game t-shirts at all So it was like, not only was it a video game t-shirt, but kind of a deep cut.

It's not like it was a huge game. Seems like even if they made apparel, it was usually children's pajamas for boys. Yeah, pajamas were the only, yeah, the pajamas were sort of where you went to for your cookie designs and for your, you know, licensed characters, I think. I guess the thought process behind that was only children would wear this, and even then they would never wear this outside because it's too embarrassing. No, they'd hide in a sleeping bag. And that's why they also made a lot of video game-themed bed sheets. That's true, yeah. Yeah, bed sheets were a big thing, too.

I think the idea was, like, you created your video game shrine around the place that you sort of sleep. And it was a private place where no one else would see that you liked video games. You don't want to bring that sin out to the public. No, absolutely not. I sleep in a Mario Kart, do you? I sleep in a big car with Bowser. So take that. I sleep in a bed that looked like a...

a ton ton with its belly sliced open. Nice. We're going in some weird directions here. So let's move into the 90. Again, this is a very loose history. I really want to know from listeners like where you were and what you experienced because for my perspective,

I seem like we're all on the same page here. This stuff was kind of hard to find. So in the 90s, still the focus was on kids and also still, it was still hard to find. And Jeremy talked about the illusion of Gaya shirt. The 90s is when the promotional T-shirt era happened where these things were not just being given to, you know, store managers or being given to people at conventions that, you know, retail managers were going to or just people in the industry.

These are now being distributed to people for, like, pre-ordering video games. Like, you get it with illusion of Gaia. I got one with Final Fantasy 7. But mostly these were just like, here is the game logo. Here is a game character. One of my favorites is, I forget how you got it, but one of my favorites is this very ugly Donkey Kong country t-shirt with, like, CGI bina. bananas all over it. That's one of my favorites. That sounds awesome to me.

It's classic 90s ugly to the point where I think it would be cool now. Yeah, the 90s are back now. 90s style fashion is huge. And I wish we could do more stuff like that at Fangammer, actually. When it comes to like all overprints like that, though, it's tough. Expensive it sounds like. It is expensive. Yeah, we try to keep things affordable and we can.

Yeah, whenever a fan gamer, when we acquire a license for an old game, like say a big example here is missed. Like, when we got the missed license, we looked online to see, like, what kind of merchandise did they release for this game back then? And it's usually all we can find are, like, whatever you had to, like, clip out of, like, a catalog to them mail in and send some money, like, through physical mail, and then you get your mist sweater that way. Yeah, like, a lot of these things were from fan clubs. Like, if you wanted a LucasArts logo T-shirt, you would have to get the LucasArts catalog with your adventure game that you, you know, you know, you would have to get the LucasArts catalog with your adventure game that you. you bought and send away for it there. But we really, at Pangamer, we really enjoy the aesthetics of old 90s stuff like that. Like, we release merch for Mist, and it's based on, like, the old stuff they released in the

90s when the game first came out. It's just, like, the logo embroidered on, like, a green sweater or just, like, embroidered on a dad cap, and that's it. And that sells really well. Like a denim, a denim dad cap? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the kind of stuff we have. And people who like Mist like that kind of aesthetic.

Did you do anything with the, like the silhouette of the guy falling? The falling guy, yes. We made a pin of that. That's the iconic image. I know. It's so good. Oh, that's a pin? Yeah, we made an ammo pin of the falling guy.

And I really want a plush of the falling guy from Mist. I don't know the official name of that, but. It was Don Draper. That's true. Yeah, actually, this reminds me. So, Jeremy, I think you ordered something from this. Like, a lot of publishers have proprietary stores. like Square had a $1,800 number, and you could order their own merch.

Like, there was, like, Final Fantasy 3 T-shirts. They, I think their games came with, like, little mini catalogs or something. Yeah. I know somehow I had, like, a physical catalog, and they were, like, buy CDs, buy a t-shirt with the logo on it. Yeah, the understanding was, I guess, at the time, like, well, we couldn't carry these things in stores, but we can make enough T-shirts to fit a demand to make a little profit on top of whatever we're doing and sort of maybe make our cult following stronger if they can, you know, have a nice, like Mughal shirt or a logo shirt

or a soundtrack for the game, which getting a soundtrack for the game was an amazing feat that early and it was so cool that they actually offer that as early as 1994, right? Yes, and it was amazing in part because it was so expensive. I spent like 40 or 50 bucks on

the three disc, on the three disc Kefka's Domain soundtrack. Is that the full dancing mat on it? It did. It had all of it. That's amazing. One track, what, 18 minutes? Something like that. And the ending. The finale is about as long. God, that's amazing. That seemed like most video game soundtracks released on CDs were in Japan only for some

reason. And now video game soundtracks are big, on vinyl even. I have a whole bunch. I have a video game vinyl soundtrack with artwork by you. Oh, yeah. Shantay. Shantay. Yeah, that was fun to do. I did Shantay, Thimblebee Park, and I'm sure I'm going to do more, but those are fun to make. I just, I don't have a vinyl record player, but I do have a bunch of vinyl records, just because I like having the physical item in my hands, just a big piece of artwork. Yeah, the sleeves are a big part of vinyl's appeal.

And also, I really enjoy listening to soundtracks on vinyl because you can't really tune it out as much as you do when you just, like, stream for hours on end and it just becomes background noise because every 18 minutes, it stops and you have to like, oh, I need to turn over the vinyl. So you kind of stay in it more. You don't have time to tune out as much. It's also fun getting to choose the colors of the vinyl. Unfortunately, the fancier the vinyl looks, the more degrades the audio quality.

Yeah, I mean, like something that's pressed on spattered vinyl is okay, but when you, yeah, start getting too fancy, it does have a deleterious effect. I like just a nice, simple, translucent vinyl. That's like a good colored translucent vinyl. That's always nice. So weirdly enough in this era, the 90s era, I honestly feel like video game pre-orders, the rise of those is what made

video game t-shirts a thing, more of a commonplace thing because you would have companies like Babbage's and software, et cetera, and GameStop. Before pre-orders were informal, it's like,

here's my number, call me when this game comes in. But then towards the late 90s, there was a system involved in which is, you know, put down $5, put down $10. They needed incentives

to give you to put money down. And these, you know, these game stores were already getting t-shirts for their employees to wear so people would ask about like, hey, what's that game on your t-shirt?

But now these were being funneled down to customers. So I feel like in a way, these pre-orders, which are now all going away again, because GameStop is just exploding. The Funkos could not sustain them. Funco Land is dead. Yes, Funko Land truly is dead. But for a time, this was making the idea of a video game t-shirt something that was attainable. Like, oh, I can get a T-shirt of a thing I like if I give some man $5 with the promise of getting a game in the future. So you think it started with just shirts for people who worked on the games as a fun thing

and then they decided to like sell off some of those because people kept asking about them? No, when you say worked on the games, you mean like employees? Yeah, employees. I doubt it. I feel like it was just like a very affordable incentive. I mean, you can mass manufacture a T-shirt for a few bucks. So it was a way for, I think, chain stores to basically say, hey, send us your your business. We're charging, you know, 80, 90 for an NES or Genesis game. So here's a little,

here's a little bit of cheddar on top for you. And I'm sure things like CES before it was a, you know, fan event and before it was really even a press event, if you go into the Blizzard booth to see what they were doing or went to like a Capcom booth, they would just be like, I have a Mega Man t-shirt, have this t-shirt, just like, you know, just there was swag back then even though like an executive would be like, I'll give my kid this. I mean, I've got the world's greatest swag, which is a a cassette tape that Meldac gave away to promote Hayanko alien. Oh my God. I paid a lot of money for it, but it's really good. Did you make a YouTube video about that? Or was that? That was Athena. Yeah. But

I do have it ripped and just need to post it on YouTube. Okay. Interesting. It's got like this whole 1950s style schlocky like, oh my God, the aliens are attacking. Help us professor. Like radio play. Is that in, that's in Japanese then? No, it's in English. Oh, wow. Like Meldac USA. Oh, wow. Okay. That's amazing. I had no idea. Is there a Hayanko Alien T-shirt? I would wear that. I think you need to nail that down.

All right. Well, Mindware, the company that created and manages it, like they're still producing and licensing Hayanko aliens. So FanCamer could potentially lock down the Hayanko license in the U.S. And I would buy all of that. Oh, I'll add that my pile of dreams. Speaking of these, oh, sorry, Jeremy. No, I was just going to say, like, yeah, there was a lot of different kinds of swag.

I think I don't know that, you know, like, CES, there would have been a lot of T-shirts because I feel like, especially in the late 80s, early 90s, that was more targeted, like, T-shirts were more something that kids wore as opposed to adults. And CES was very much a professional trade show. So you tended to get things more like cassette tapes or, you know, books or something. A key ring. Yeah, whereas now, you know, you have more consumer-oriented trade shows. So you do see more of, like, the, you know, and also adults are more.

likely to wear a t-shirt. Yeah, now you can wear a graphic tea with a video game character on it and then wear a nice blazer over it and call it business casual. Last time I went to church, I was like, huh, it's like a picnic in here. That's not how I would I remember from when I was a kid. You can go to church or present a game at E3 with your blazer over your graphic tee. You can even wear my Bionic Commando exploding Master D head shirt and wear a nice blazer over it.

Wear to a baptism. See what happens. That's my plan. Yeah, and we were working in the press, Jeremy. We were very much exposed to the world of free t-shirts where it. it was like a currency in the world of the game press where you would see so many and I'm in the process of getting rid of most of mine

because I've been in the press really for like five years almost and like one out of every 20 would fit and then maybe one of every 50 I would want to wear outside they were really just like workout shirts or they were sleep shirts but the common theme of those shirts were they were all XL like Excel was just across the board GFW Radio always called the

shame tarps. Shame tarps, gamer, shame tarps. Yeah. But very rarely did these PR mailing t-shirts demonstrate any real effort or creativity. It was pretty much just like, here's some artwork, here's the logo, you know, just the kind of standard stuff. You didn't see the kind of things that emerged like on threadless and on other kind of boutique t-shirts shops.

Like that just wasn't a thing. I think the most clever shirt I got was for Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2, which was just a Dragon Quest slime, and this came out right around February, so the shirt said, Be My Valen Slime. That was it. I was out to mention that. That's nice. I like that. I want that shirt, but I'm sure it doesn't come in my size.

Yeah, Nina has a special problem because you wear a very small t-shirt size. Even small is too big, so you would be just, like, lost in the games press. Yeah, like, I talked about how, like, growing up, it was hard for me to find geeky shirts aimed towards girls and women that aren't condescending, condescendingly, like, pink and has something about women on it. Yeah. It's hard for me to find shirts that are small enough for me.

I'm 5-7, 160 pounds, and if I don't get a size small or sometimes extra small, it's still like I'm swimming in it. I'm not trying to, like, advertise for a fan gaming here, but... Oh, no, we're all big shilter fangamer. I don't have to pretend that of ethics anymore, so I'm fine. Even before I started working for them, one of the things I loved about fangamer was, like, the range of sizes we offer. So we offer like extra small for unisex and women.

And also we offer up to size 6x for unisex. Yeah, which I love working at the fan humor booth, like selling stuff and having someone come up and like dejectedly ask like, oh, I bet you don't have any, like what's the biggest size you have, I bet you don't have it. And I'm like, oh, actually we offer a size up to 6x. And then their eyes light up and they're like, what? Really? And they just look so happy and I love that. I want to talk a bit about the limitations of women's apparel though because.

Oh, please do. Yeah, like working in the industry now, I understand why so many t-shirts are, like, enormous, or they only offer unisex sizes, which is frustrating, but it mostly has to do with the limitations of what blank apparel we can get. So, like, the companies that make blank apparel tend to not always, they tend not to always use the same fabrics to make unisex and women's shirts for some reason. So I might, like, say I design a shirt meant for a unisex shirt, but then I find out there's no women's shirt that uses the same color, even if it's from the same company for some reason.

Let's say I just make a design meant to be on a very light, soft pink shirt, but for women's, there's only like a dark fuchsia. So at that point, I either have to go with another shirt color, which, you know, changes the entire field, the design, or adjust the colors of the design to make it work for both colors, which can be very tough. So usually I just have to like mix the shirt color altogether. And women's, women's, uh, t-shirts are you. usually, they're usually like a thinner and stretchier fabric, right, as opposed to men's, which is more like, you know, durable cotton. I really wish more companies would just take whatever fabric they use for unisex shirts and just

make women's cut out of it, the more fitted cut. And then there's a limitation with the sizes. So it's actually really hard to find a place that sells anything bigger than 2x for women, which is really frustrating. Like the company Fangamor uses four women's teas goes up to 4x and has a good selection of colors, which is why we stick with them. But like we wish we could offer up to 6x like we do for unisex, but we just can't find a good place. And even if we find a place that offers those sizes for women, they don't have like a good selection of colors. So like we'll get

like people being like, I wish the women's sizes for this shirt design came in the same shade of green as a unisex. Why isn't, aren't they the same? It's like, well, we, we just don't have that option. Or they want something bigger than a 4x. And we just. can't find a place that we can use for that. I don't know. It's really frustrating. And we try our best, though. Like, I think Fan Gamer has the best range of sizes.

The fact that we offer women's sizes at all is good, I think. There's so many times where I want, like, a really cool shirt, and then I find out they only have men's sizes. They assume that there won't be a market for women, I'm guessing, right? I think that's what it is. It's really disappointing. I have to say, this is not a plug for a fan gamer, but I worked in their booth at Pax West and what they brought into my life changed it forever. That's a short folder. And I recommend

everyone go out there and buy a T-shirt folder for 20 bucks. Any brand you want. I'm a new person now, right? Yeah. You really took to that quickly. Yeah. And folding shirts is a big thing now thanks to Marie Kondo. Yes. I've adopted the, what is her, what is her slogan? To spark joy? Yeah. That thing sparks joy. I enjoy folding now. It's a fun adventure. So please, that's my plug for this episode. Does it do dress shirts also? It does like everything. It's just a very simple device. It's really cool. And it saves a lot of space. So this is just

lifestyle tips for our audience. Get a shirt folder. They're like 20 bucks on Amazon. I mentioned this earlier, but Bob is wearing a Dragon Quest 11 shirt, and it's a promotional shirt they gave away a packs if you played the demo for Dragon Quest 11. And it was, I was actually the one that got it, but the smallest size they had was a UnisXS. And unfortunately, it was just a little bit too baggy for my taste, so I gave it to Bob instead. It could be very well. Yes. I'm glad you can wear a size S so you can take my leftovers.

And it's very stylish. It has the character silhouettes all walking in a line, and this is Dragon Quest 11 on the back. Yeah, there is an advertisement on the back. It's like I can wear my flannel shirt over it and pretend it's not a video game thing. So I want to move on through the history, of course. So we're talking about the 90s where my theory is like pre-order incentives is really, you know, let people know. A video game t-shirt is a thing you can wear. So now we're in the early to mid-2000s.

And my other theory is, like, this is when Gen Xers are getting their way into boardrooms and getting their way into merchandising places of influence, where I started seeing a lot of video game t-shirts in places like Target and GameStop and things like that. But they were all very, very embarrassing. The early 2000s were the era or was the era of, I'm going to get a t-shirt. And there will be a joke printed on my t-shirt that a person should read. and perhaps laugh at. So finding a video game t-shirt without text on it was a challenge.

My first one that wasn't the Pac-Man shirt that I talked about earlier, I think I bought in 2001. It was a picture of an Atari 2,600 joystick or an approximation of one, and it said, old school underneath it, and that is the least embarrassing one I could find. But this is the era of, for the art for asking for questions for this episode, I found a very embarrassing shirt that says classically trained with an NES game pad above it. We have things like

Here are all the Metal Gear weapons And the text is say hello to my little friends Things like that Very, very, very embarrassing And we're not in this era anymore But mini shirts casting aspersions On the veracity of sweet baked goods That's true, that's true

We learned all about whether or not cake is You know, true or false In this era But yeah, this is a very dark era But soon we will be brought out of this era Again with another plug for fan gamer The greatest website ever, FanGamer.com. They've given me so many free t-shirts.

I have to plug them. I mean, we're in deep with them. Van Gamer does our fulfillment on our Kickstarter, not Kickstarter, Patreon bonuses. They publish my books. They publish magazines, or not magazines, posters. They helped us launch the flip grip. So it's not like we're objective here. We work with them a lot, and of course, you know, works for them.

We work with them because they're great. They are great. And I was following them way back when they said. started because they started sort of in a way alongside the release of the fan translation of Mother 3. Is that correct Nina? They were like coming up alongside that and that was a very exciting movement

for me and that was a time where that game was coming out English for the first time unofficially but they were also making earthbound t-shirts and my entire life all I wanted was an earthbound teacher so I bought two of them and I got pins and I also got the silver keychain

which I still have the Franklin badge or not silver but whatever it's made out of. I think bronze It's still holding up, it's still great, but I got that for pre-ordering the Mother 3 guide, which I think Fangammer also published. Is that correct? Yep. Yeah, actually, that's an important part of Fangamor history, is the fact that they started as Starman.net, or I mean, that's still around.

It's not like it's gone now, but it was an offshoot of Starman.comnet, the Earthbound fan community online. It was a forum, and then people on there decided to sell Earthbound-inspired merchandise, and that kind of became Fanggamer. It all started from wanting a certain kind of merchandise and not being available and then just taking initiative to make your own without having, you know, stepping on, you know, copyright, trademarks or anything like that. Yeah, I remember before they were a fan gamer, they, you know, took some initiative to try to build awareness of Mother 3. And I ended up receiving like this really thick, detailed book full of fan art and it had CDs of fan. music and stuff in it, basically like, hey, we really love mother, and it's a really cool thing, and you should, like, make some noise about it, so Nintendo will be aware of it.

Reggie Fisa May deleted the source code before he left Nintendo. That's my source. That's my conspiracy theory. I feel bad for the guy. He still hasn't escaped people begging him for Mother 3, even though he's no longer Nintendo. It will haunt because he never gave it to us. If I see him on the street, I will chase him down. Actually, I would not chase him. I'm afraid of him. He's huge and terrifying. I would meekly ask him for Mother 3 and then run away. But, yeah, in 2008, because I was tapped into the Mother 3 translation, I was, like, way into FanGamer. I was doing a lot of blogging. Blogs still existed because they weren't ruined by rich people with too much money.

So blogs are still a thing. I was doing a lot of blogging. And I was blogging for a site called Nerve and working for one-up at the same time in freelance capacity. And I couldn't stop, like, writing about Fangamer. Like, guys, you got to see Fan Gamer. Finally, there is video game merch that's not embarrassing. It's very well made. I've been waiting for this my entire life.

Also, you have to like Earthbound, but you should anyways. You know what? Sorry, you can bring up a good point. Like, I was a fan of a fangamer before I started working for them because they make stylish shirts that are more obscure and it's not just like an NES controller like stuck on the chest. It's more like you have to be an actual fan of that game to know what the actual shirt is. And if you don't know, then it just looks like a cool piece of artwork on the shirt. Yeah, they deal in a lot of iconography. I've got a couple of fan gamer stickers that have come with orders on my laptop. And, like, one of them is just a pair of pipes in an X shape.

I put it on my laptop into the wrong angle. But then it's surrounded by icons of a star, a flower, a leaf, and a mushroom. Like, if you know Mario, you know, that's Super Mario Bros. 3 iconography. But if you don't, it's just like, oh, what's this? It's kind of interesting and artsy. Yeah, and again, like we mentioned before, that came out of necessity because Fang, Gember didn't have the rights to the actual iconography of those games. And so we had to come up with stylish interpretations, things that evoke imagery from those games.

And that kind of became our biggest strength. Yeah, and I remember when the company first started and I was ordering things from them with the very little money I had being a grad student, you would get things like stickers and pins with your order and you still do. And even things like original drawings. So I'm not sure if those happen anymore because fan gamers expanded so much. You don't get original like drawing stuck into your order anymore. Do you, Nina? No, we just, I don't know. I understand why.

It's a scale thing. Too many orders now. If you're selling to like a thousand earthbound fans compared to like selling blood-borne t-shirts, there's a lot more work that has to be done, you know, to put into a package. It's come to the point where we don't, we can't really afford the time to write down the names that the person that ordered it on each like slip that we include in these packages anymore. I mean, even right now, like Fangamor, like as we speak, is moving to an even bigger office. They just moved to a new office like two, three years ago, and it's outgrown that, and now it's even bigger. I mean, so I was looking at other businesses that are similar to FanGamer, and Fan Gamer was the pioneer in this movement.

I mean, I don't think they were single-handedly responsible for, you know, good video game merchandise, but I think they were the most important factor in the fact that we now have very stylish, very good video game wearables that are not embarrassing and that you can, you know, proudly wear in public. That's not just a logo or a bad drawing of Mario or, you know, like, you know, saving the princess is 1985 or whatever, any of that crap. And we do pay close attention to, like, recent fashion trends. Like right now, it's perfect for video game merchandise, actually, because of the 90s fashion, the revival of 90s fashion. And that's when video games came out. So it all pairs together absolutely perfectly. I love that.

So I think for a long time, fashion and geek fandom didn't. not mixed at all. I think people who worked in the geeky industries didn't think like people who were into those things cared about fashion in any sort of way, which is probably why they just like, you know, slap a character or like a logo on a shirt and call it a day. But now like geeky stuff is so mainstream. I mean, it's amazing how mainstream, like say Marvel has become. Like back in the 90s when I was into Marvel Comics, it was so hard to find like a good, Spider-Man t-shirt and now it's absolutely everywhere and you can find like really cool stylish stuff and the same thing has happened to video games like even just like yesterday i went to yeah that's right

yeah i went to forever 21 which is going to business unfortunately but they were having clearance sale and i found um what what sounds like a a punchline to a joke it's a PlayStation crop top for women and like yeah it's like a fashionable crop top and it's found in forever 21 which is like which is meant to be an affordable high fashion for young people and to think they have like a cool kind of like sexy crop top for women that has like the PlayStation logo on it like on the chest and down the sleeves

that's crazy like you can never find anything like that back when the PlayStation stream like the first PlayStation was actually out yeah you get your Polygon Man head shirt for pre-ordering the PlayStation maybe but I love the fact that you can find things like that now. It's like they actually recognize that people play video games and women play video games especially and there's nothing like sassy on there

like there's no sassy phrasing. There's no female characters. It's not pink. It's just like it's just kind of non-condescending and part of that is definitely because of the return of like 90s retro stuff. But I don't know like I saw that and I bought it right away because I'm like this kind of like perfectly encapsulates how far video game fashion has come.

Yeah, I think another big thing that has been kind of propelling this forward was maybe like 10 years ago or so, the advent of just direct sales through the internet of custom printed, not custom printed, but like very limited printed, very kind of highly focused t-shirt concepts. I can't remember the name of the site, but there was a site that. Oh, I know. Was it Woot? Yes, woof. Yeah, every day they just had, like, they would sell a shirt design,

and it would only be available for that day. And it would be like $8, right? And it was very inexpensive, and I bought a ton of shirts that were like, Me too. Like Pac-Man or, you know, just tons of video games. There were also not video game things like, you know, like jokes about G.I. Joe or something with a logo. There was a great shirt that had, like, an astronaut working on the space shuttle,

but there was like the asteroids from asteroids, the vector asteroids, flying at him, just, you know, things like that. I bought weird, like, bird shirts from them, like cartoon bird designs and roosters and things like that. Yeah, I mean, eventually I pretty much stopped wearing t-shirts, so I stopped ordering from them. But, yeah, their shirts were very inexpensive,

and they were fun. They were often very stylish. They had interesting colors to them. It was just, you know, like, it was different. You don't see me black bucks, turn out the night. You feel this way. through the waves Take up your shirt

Turn out the music The shower Where flies It feels It's so bad You know You know At the street

We've done before On the head of the beast is all I see In head and he's down Let me stay When I need you Yeah, so great big Yeah, so, like a lot of companies are now in existence.

After FanGamer, things like I am 8 bit, insert coin, we love fine, Sanchi, you can see a lot of these folks at Retro Gaming cons and even bigger things like packs. Like there is now a huge market for very good t-shirts that you are not embarrassed to wear. And now that we're in the 2010s and the 2010s are almost over actually, this has been the real golden era for merch and it's only going to get better from here. Like, especially things like pop-up shops, more of a thing in Japan, but now they're happening in America where it's just like, here's a chance to buy like the most obscure t-shirt and all the most obscure merch you have. You'll come in here and you'll spend like

$500, but you can only buy it at this one location. But you can only buy it at this one location. But even outside of that, like Uniclo has been expanding in America. We're lucky because we live in the Bay Area. There are two out here. But Uniclo is a great Japanese clothing line. They sell affordable clothing. And they have new t-shirt campaigns like all the time constantly. I think what was the last thing that we were in Uniclo in Vancouver recently?

There was a campaign for the new One Piece movie and there was like a Capcom fighting game campaign. I think you bought one of those shirts. Yeah, I got the double Kyo shirt. shirt with Ken and Ryu dead in the middle there Yeah, like they had they had like a lot of Shonen Jump stuff they tend to do a lot of

Shonen Jump lines and I think they hold like contests too sometimes I remember there was like a Pokemon shirt design contest and a Nintendo shirt design contest and like

contest can be kind of a shady way of like getting spec work like free spec work but it's kind of cool how they kind of reach out to the fans and see what the fans want and then like decide to release affordable shirts featuring you know like say like a more like a cool Mario spright or like for Pokemon they actually would use like people's own art for that yeah and even if sometimes they do just take art directly from the source like I do love really love their manga shirts

because often it will be like here is a really iconic drawing of Vegeta from this one chapter you all know, we're just going to put that on a shirt or like literally just putting a famous panel on a shirt, even though it's like not very creative or like artistically inspired. For some reason, that is just very striking and it looks very cool. Like just having a giant manga panel on your shirt from a very famous scene. Actually, one of my favorite pieces of video game merchandise is an Animal Crossing shirt that Uniclo released. It's kind of an all over print with like a bunch of heads from Animal Crossing.

And it was only for children for some reason. but I can wear the biggest size for children, unfortunately, so I have that. Although I did go to a child's birthday party once. It was the daughter of Reid Young, who is the founder of Fan Gamer. I went to her birthday party, and she was wearing it. And I was like, oh, I'm glad I didn't wear mine because that would have been very awkward. You should have called each other on your Flintstone phone. Yeah, so we have one final note in here.

I believe Nina put this in here. there's a great Nintendo Life article if you want to read more about fan gamer or anything that we didn't cover will be in there. It's called How Fan Gamer Changed the World of Video Game Merchandise Forever and I'll put a link to that

in our official description of this podcast you can probably just look at your device and there'll be a link to it in the notes of this podcast. But yeah, that's essentially been our little podcast about video game merge. It was pretty loose but again there's no definitive history of this.

That's a book for someone else to write and a lot of work for someone else to do but talking to people, digging through archives, looking at catalogs. But I really just wanted to offer a loose history from my perspective and also have Nina talk about her experience as someone who makes shirts and will continue to make shirts because she's so good at it. You're very good at what you do, Nina. Thank you. Yes. But Nina, you're a special guest.

We talked a lot about Fan Gamer. Plug them again and let them know I'm waiting for their check because Daddy needs to get paid. Well, I don't do just T-Shirt for Fan Gamer. I also design pins and plushes and other things. That's right. I do posters. You can go to fangamer.com, go to collections, artist, SpaceCoyote, and there you can see everything I've done for them. You can also go to my Twitter, which is SpaceCoyote, that's SpaceCoyote with an L at the end instead of an E.

Every time I release new video game merchandise that I designed, I plug that on there. That's the best way to keep up to date with my stuff. You can also go to SpaceCoyote.com to see anything else I've done. and I recently opened an Instagram at space.coyote.art. And also, everyone should go into Amazon.com and pre-order Sparks' triple double dog there. That's right. That's a sequel to Sparks, which is a children's graphic novel I did for Scholastic. It's about two cats that dress up as a dog in a mechanical dog-shaped suit to save people. The second one is coming out next August.

That'll be out before the Kaiji compilation I pre-ordered last October. Don't remind me that's depressing. Looking forward to reading The New Sparks. So, yeah, as for us, we've been Retronauts. If you want to support the show and get your podcast one week ahead of time and add free, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up for a little bit of change, you'll get just that and help support the show. We're completely fan-supported podcasts. We've been doing this independently for, this is our seventh year now, people.

We've been really pumping out these podcasts. I think at the end of this year, we'll have done more years independently than we ever did at one-up. So we're reaching some new milestones there. We could make it happen without you. So if you want to help support the show and get a little something in return, please go to patreon.com slash retronauts. Jeremy, you do other things outside of the podcast. Please plug them, including great books from fangamer.com.

That's true. You can go to fangamer.com and look at my name, and you'll find books about video games. If you can believe that, all video games. You can also find the videos upon which the source material for the books that I create is sort of forged at YouTube. That's NES works,

Game Boy Works, et cetera. Just compilations and chronologies of old video games. And also, I tweet on Twitter.com as GameSpite. So as for me, I've been the host of this episode. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also do other podcasts about other old things,

old cartoons, as a matter of fact. So check them out. They are Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons, and what a cartoon. where you look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. And you can find those

wherever you find podcasts or you can go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons to sign up and get them also early and you'll also have access to our new miniseries. An old miniseries, the newest one is Talking Futurama

Season 2, part one, 10 new episodes of that podcast only for patrons. And if you want to check out what a cartoon, I recommend Jeremy's episodes. He's been on it for things like BubbleGum Crisis,

The Max, and G.I. Joe, and Nina's been on it for things like Clone High. So if you like hearing their voices, they are on some of our what a cartoons. But as for us at Retronauts, we will see you next time for our brand new podcast. Thanks for listening. down my heart Oh my heart No, God's

No, God's fire Thank you.