.hack Part 4 - QUARANTINE

Yet another Moke sourced shirt.
This one came in the same plastic bag as the last two and was also from GameStop. This was either a pre-order bonus for the game .hack//Quarantine or was a promo item for the employees. You can bet that this was in their take home bin and was snagged after a long time of sitting around. As for getting one now? I'd check eBay if I were you.
I've played a few of the .hack games but I was more interested in the anime. This shirt could count for either since all the characters and plots intermingle but since it was from GameStop and has the "Part 4" on it that means it was about the video game specifically. The .hack series was one of the first intellectual properties to span all mediums. They tried to take the story over every distribution channel they could: manga, toys, video games, sound tracks, anime and web. It is somewhat thanks to .hack that now companies are releasing their products in multiple formats every time they come out. I hate to keep complaining about it but this shirt is an extra-large too, I usually wear fairly baggy clothes so I don't mind. I don't think there's anyone out there looking to judge my style.
On the front is the "dot hack Quarantine part 4" logo in English and Japanese. It's all white and grey except for the bottom where it has the "BANDAI" logo in red.  .hack//Quarantine is the 4th title in the .hack line of games on PlayStation 2. They follow a main protagonist who is stuck in an MMORPG. The weird thing is that all of these games are simulated MMORPGs, like they have other characters approach you as if they are real people playing non-player characters and you get "ingame" mail and everything. They eventually came out with an online version where you can interact with other players. Anyway, on the back is a huge graphic from the game. Though the character design is correct the graphics don't represent those in the game, it's more based off the Anime than anything else. At the bottom left it has the name of the character "Helba" and running down the side they put the name of the game again, ".hack//絶対包囲 (4.0 QUARANTINE)". The last thing they added was the website that you can go to for more information on the entire franchise:
http://www.dothack.com
I find it kind of funny, I would choose to wear this in an anime setting rather than a video game setting. I suppose that's because I am much more familiar with the animes .hack//Sign and .hack//Legend of the Twilight than the actual video game series. The whole thing started in the states around 2002 so people might find this nostalgic if they had played the games or watched the anime or read the mangas, etc.

When I first got these I didn't think that they would have much of an effect since they are mainly promotional pieces from several years ago. But it seems that there were a ton of people who hung around at GameStop/EB Games/FuncoLand/Babbage's/Micromania/MovieStop etc. during that time. These shirts apparently got a lot of play back in the day -in all the right circles- and I guess their companies were smart to distribute them in this way. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that I don't know of a lot of these shirts since I haven't been a regular in GameStop in several years (for all the right reasons).