Game Over

Hopefully you can see that this was handmade.
A very very long time ago I had my mom help me create this shirt. Way back then it was nearly impossible to get a good video game shirt. Like the shirt yesterday, I wanted a specific kind so bad that I had to make it. This shirt is definitely one of a kind. If I were to ever recreate it I would just create/gather all of these images on the computer and use iron-ons for the desired effect.
It was all constructed with fabric pens and paint. The details and shear volume of characters made it so that iron-ons would be too expensive and could not cover the large area of the main graphic. This shirt was practically an exercise in using these tools. Some of these characters it look okay but others look like a kid's drawings. Due to the nature of the medium the shirt has to be white so that the ink can dye the fabric properly. Anything drawn with the markers begins to quickly fade off and wash away, while all of the paint stays fairly intact. It has a whole lot of room to draw on, a nice big canvas because it's a large -too big for me back then but I wanted to show it off-.
The list of references is super super long here. When I was getting the pictures in order to make this shirt I pulled them from the Internet and magazines. Once I got them all they were traced onto the shirt and colored in. On the front is from the cover of a GamePro or a Nintendo Power featuring a dazed Yoshi over the words "GAME OVER". Inside the "O" is baby Mario from Yoshi's Island and above the "G" is Toad from Super Mario RPG. Below that is the full "Nintendo" logo -you can barely make it out but there is glitter used on the dot of the "i"-. I don't have a side pic for any of these posts but on the left side is a castle tower from Mario that I took from a strategy guide and on the right is Bugs Bunny in a running pose. From left to right on the back is Zero, Mickey Mouse, Kirby -from Kirby Super Star-, Sonic, Mega Man X, Donkey Kong, the "Sega" logo and Mario -from Super Mario 64-. There isn't much rhyme or reason to the layout. Almost all my designs back then were very much like this: cramming as many elements into the space as possible.
By putting a bunch of different characters and logos on here I was hoping to cover all my bases; essentially creating the perfect shirt. It's got everything: current, retro, classic, kiddie, action, Sega and Nintendo. All of these brands and characters would cause a licencing nightmare and that's what makes this so special. If you know anything about video games you'll get the reference. It's a nice test to see if you can name all of them.

Back in the day this was pretty impressive, since custom shirts were almost unheard of. Even more impressive was a video game shirt. The quality is lacking but the importance is all the work that went into it. I was super stoked when I pulled this out from the attic a few weeks ago. I don't remember the last time I wore this before today. I really only could have dreamed to wear this shirt to the E3 Expo. When people see me in this shirt they can see that it's really shoddy looking and are shocked that it's hand made -almost as if it's bad on purpose-. If you've been reading the blog and saw this you'd know that it's from my past, but if you're seeing it for the first time you might think that I'm on of "those fans" with a really bad handmade shirt.