Shirts & game crossovers
Filed under Game trail; Comments Off on Shirts & game crossovers |
Chris Torrence, host of the Assembly Lines video podcast and volunteer at the Media Archaeology Lab, recently added an e-commerce store to his online offerings.
T-shirts based on 8-bit franchises and artwork are nothing new; my closet is full of KansasFest, A2Central.com, and even InTrec shirts. But one item in Chris’s catalog caught my eye.
This @CT6502 shirt mashing up Oregon Trail & Choplifter is hilarious. I've never seen that design before—is it original? https://t.co/uA3C0Atc0t
— Ken Gagne (@kgagne) June 13, 2019
This shirt doesn’t just juxtapose Choplifter and Oregon Trail; it actually has them interacting in an unexpected fashion. I was tickled by this unique approach! After Chris confirmed that it is an original design, the Twitterverse requested other crossovers. Chris quickly responded by mocking up Lemonade Stand and Karateka:
Mark Lemmert of 6502 Workshop proposed a Lemonade Stand / Castle Wolfenstein mashup, which caught Kay Savetz’s attention:
Achtung! The weather is sunny!
— Kay Savetz (@KevinSavetz) June 14, 2019
I then responded> to @rubygolem’s proposal for The Bard’s Tale and Carmen Sandiego, prompting them to rise to the occasion:
I proposed a boatload of other crossovers, too:
Castle Wolfenstein / Karateka: Take on the Nazis with your martial arts!
Castle Wolfenstein / Lode Runner: Bury the Nazis and steal their gold!
Ultima / Archon: Ultima, but Archon battles.
Leisure Suit Larry / Colossal Cave: You are in a hotel of twisty little passages, all alike— Ken Gagne (@kgagne) June 14, 2019
There are plenty of other crossovers I’d like to see, either in game or shirt form, some which may be more a stretch than others:
Video game crossovers are becoming more common: just this past week, Nintendo joined forces with Sega for a Mario & Sonic game and with Square Enix for a Smash Bros. team-up. In those scenarios, companies collaborate to lend each other their well-known brands and icons. That wouldn’t be possible with many Apple II games, whose copyright holders are defunct or just not good with sharing.
But it doesn’t mean a creative entrepreneur like Chris Torrence couldn’t mock something up!
(Full disclosure: As an Automattic employee, I recommended Chris use WordPress as his store’s content management system (CMS) of choice and gave some minor advice upon its launch. I also support Chris’ Patreon.)