Shirts & game crossovers

June 17th, 2019 9:43 AM
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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 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:

Karateka guy kicking Lemonade Stand

Mark Lemmert of 6502 Workshop proposed a Lemonade Stand / Castle Wolfenstein mashup, which caught Kay Savetz’s attention:

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:

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:

  •  Leisure Suit Larry / Space Quest: Meet exotic aliens. Have sex with them.
  •  One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird / Olympic Decathlon: Play basketball while simultaneously breaking your keyboard.
  •  Tass Times in Tone Town / Escape from Antcatraz: The colony’s grandfather ant has gone missing! Trace his disappearance across several anthills.
  •  Jungle Hunt / Impossible Mission: Avoid drones and alligators while saving damsels and cracking safes.
  • 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.)

    The shirts of KansasFest

    July 3rd, 2017 1:48 PM
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    Earlier this year, I wrote a tribute to an Apple II user who had passed away — something I’ve now done too many damn times. But in remembering Steve Gozdziewski, I also recalled sharing this moment with him at KansasFest 2002:

    KansasFest attendees wearing shirts representing the event's different years

    Many of those pictured had been coming to KansasFest for years (2002 was the event’s fourteenth year, and my fifth), and we spontaneously decided to represent our long lineage by donning the various years’ shirts that we’d happened to bring with us. (We staged a similar shot another year, though I can’t seem to find it in the available archives.)

    That got me thinking: why not plan another shirt photo? With this month’s KansasFest being the 29th, it’s unlikely we’ll have representatives from every year — but it’d be fun to try!

    So if you’ve ever attended a previous KansasFest and are one of the hundred who are coming to KansasFest 2017, please use the below form to indicate which years’ KansasFest shirts you own. A week from today, July 10, I’ll email everyone their packing instructions to ensure we show up in Kansas City with as complete a set as possible!

    Which years' shirts do you have?

    Let’s create another photo by which to remember the many years and friends we’ve shared across the decades.