Fan Festival 2008

I got this shirt when I was working the Square Enix, FINAL FANTASY XI convention.
They gave one to all of the staff, to wear while we were working that day.
Okay, so yeah, it's black with white screened on ink. Super standard -and a large-, but still falling under my rather generous guidelines for an awesome shirt. Maybe I don't need more of these, maybe this one's special.
Even though they are very mass produced and well distributed shirts, they are bold and the logo is well designed -in my opinion.- The only thing on the front is the fan festival logo and the year of the event, which was when I attended in 2008. The back is just the FINAL FANTASY XI online logo, since the Fan Festival is only for the community of that one game. After wearing it a lot it has developed a few cracks and creases, but I think on some shirts it adds an air of experience and value.
http://www.ffxifestival.com/
I like wearing this shirt to work or anywhere FINAL FANTASY XI players can be found. At work there are only a few people who have this shirt and even a smaller number who wear them. World of Warcraft has their Blizz-Con, Everquest players have the Fan Faire and we have the Fan Festival. Since this game has survived for so long -nearly 7 years- the only people left playing are the hardest of hardcore. They have to be hardcore by now because of two similar but diverging reasons: 1) Square Enix has a policy in regards to character data unlike many other companies. It basically states that, if you stop paying for the account for longer than 3 months the characters may be deleted. So after spending years on a game like this you wouldn't want it to all be for nothing, so you keep the account active. 2) The time it takes to get to max level in this game is ridiculous. I suppose getting to the highest level in only one "job" or class it is reasonable, but -similar to Dungeons & Dragons- you can get multiple jobs to max level, and the people who have leveled all their jobs to max and have the gear to back it up are few and far between. If you develop your character and have devoted that much time you have to keep playing. It is these die hard players that I am saluting and trying to associate myself with when I wear this shirt around.
After playing Everquest for so many years, I really have respect for these players. When I got the gig to work the convention I was stoked. They needed me to come in early, before it opened in order to get all of the training in order. I met up with the my supervisor for the day -who was very on task but chill with all the workers- and we all got our shirts and badges. On that day, wearing this shirt also came with a certain responsibility and pride. I was someone who you could ask for help, someone who knew what was going on behind the scenes, I guess you could say that I feel like a somebody in this shirt haha. I ended up working a special timed demo of an exclusive ingame event for the players. It was super fun meeting all of the power players and helping them get set up and compete in the events that day. I don't think they've had a US Fan Festival since then but I would go back in a second, if they wanted me to.