Tomb Raider

prime

My mom brought this back for me from E3 in 2003 or so.
She picked it up at the same convention that the "Game Shark" shirt was from. This was way before I could go, I was still in high school for that matter. I wanted to get as much as I could from that conference so I told her to take a ton of pictures and gather anything that wasn't nailed down. She got a few shirts and a whole gallery of pictures. This shirt is rare but the game that it's from wasn't amazing. You might be able to pick one up on eBay if you kept checking back every once and a while.
This shirt was big on me in high school and it's still big on me now as an extra large. It's hard to complain about freebies -especially hard to find or limited edition ones-. You can tell that they didn't put a whole lot of time and effort into the design or production of these shirts. Having a big brand and an exclusivity gives you a pretty big crutch to stand on. If you could print a shirt that just said Coca-Cola or Microsoft in the traditional font you could probably sell them without any other elements of the design, even more so if they were only available from one location for a limited time. At least they chose to have some color on the logo with grey, yellow and red against the white of the fabric. I've never had a Tomb Raider shirt, but then again, I've never seen one for sale anywhere.
As I was saying, they didn't put much thought into this shirt. It has two parts, the title and the sub-head. Mainly it says "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider", which is a 3rd person action/puzzle franchise with a busty protagonist who's been established for some time. This shirt in particular is pushing the game "the angel of darkness". Unfortunately, Angel of Darkness was a lousy game -other than the hot lead character-. That's the whole shirt, not even an Eidos, PlayStation or XBOX logo anywhere else on the shirt. They didn't even have the foresight to put a release date or something.
I pulled this one out today because it's the first day of E3 and Square Enix just released a new trailer for Tomb Raider. This is actually one of the few times this shirt has been relevant. Other than today, this is a fair to poor video game reference shirt. It's too big and not detailed enough. This shirt really was in its prime before the game was coming out. Back then you could talk about what it might be like and even birdwatch the conversation to new games and series. Now, it's just a relic of an old conference and a bad title.

I used to wear this back in high school just after E3. I thought it was awesome because people might be jealous of the rare swag or that I knew someone who got into E3. Since we were watching some of the E3 coverage unfolding with Tomb Raider I actually got to make a comment on the shirt, nothing really came of it but it was fun to have a relevant shirt. Hopefully this year's E3 will net me even more shirts!