I‘m in god darned california and I don’t see much of this stuff, so I‘m SUSPICOUS, but also I don’t browse the t-shirts every time, so… who knows. I spend most of my time in the electronics and media sections finding stuff like this:
I got a very skewed view of the goodwill outlet/warehouse stores because the first one I went to was in portland, and it was super clean. I got a top-end SVHS player, some cool tapes, a SNES, a Genesis, and some other stuff for like $20. Every one of those I've been to since has just been a pile of smelly rotting clothing with people wearing gas masks and gloves!! I don't know what it is about the portland store, maybe I just got lucky that day.
Gawd … I have a small pile of shirts/clothing that I‘ve amassed from press events throughout the years that I don’t fit in, but never really threw out either because they‘re cool and/or I tend to hoard crap (I also think my kid will find them as a teenager and it’ll add bonus cool points to her clothing game). I‘ll try to dig through them for cool stuff to post n’ share.
In the mean time I do have pictures of my old school B-series (EVO before it was called EVO) tournament staff shirts and the MvC2 E3 Press tournament shirt to share. :)
@exodus#4092 Those are some pretty fun finds! And yeah dude, those outlet stores are hella gross. They smell stanky and people who don‘t use gloves are either pros at deflecting germs or just don’t think about that kinda stuff. The ones down here in Florida are disorganized ans flooded with people, but moreso now, a mixture of people who genuinely need stuff they're finding and hypebeasts who are looking for things to flip.
@sosadillatron#4114 That last shirt (is that the back of the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 shirt?) is INCREDIBLE. All I own is an Onimusha 2 one I nabbed off Poshmark one night because I was bored.
@aolnetscape#4211 Yep! It's definitely one of the cooler “swag” shirts in my pile.
That Onimusha 2 shirt is cool as well. Capcom did good swag shirts. One that sticks out in my mind is ... I think it was Dino Crisis 2? I believe it was camo. Someone else was wearing it. :P
I‘ve given away every swag shirt I’ve ever gotten except one for the halo 3 multiplayer beta that (years later) a dude almost tore off my body to try and have it for himself.
I saw on your website that you were looking for more information on Bonk Merchandise. Well, I‘m not sure where I got it originally, I think it was part of a promo package my stepfather got for his work with NEC and I just inherited it, but it may have been bought as a gift or something when I was younger. At any rate, it’s a T-shirt, fire-engine red, with a picture of Bonk bonking Saddam Hussein. Yup, I couldn't make something like that up: “Bonk bonks Saddam Hussein” you can see for yourself.
https://bonkzonk.com/story.shtml
Oh, and if someone has Newspaper.com access, the shirt is mentioned in this November 20 1990 article in The Boston Globe. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/439421512/
Here's the OCR text
>
Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, a company that makes computer games asked children to name the Darth Vader of their worst nightmare. In a survey for NEC Technologies conducted by VideoGames magazine, Hussein lapped the field, though such first-name baddies as Zsa Zsa, Roseanne and The Donald made strong showings. Don‘t look for Hussein as the villain in the new video game Bonk’s Adventure, however. In formatting a program, for the game‘s eponymous hero (described as a “gnarly cave dude” and a “vigilante for good”), NEC decided to stick with the basics. Instead of doing battle with Hussein, Bonk will contend with the Evil King Drool. Nevertheless, hoping to cash in on Hussein’s bad-guy cachet, NEC has printed collector's item T-shirts that read “Bonk Bonks Saddam Hussein.”
they could probably sell that shirt at a target today, since post-post-irony is pop culture now. they have like 50 different wolf howling at moon shirts over there
target probably moved past it at this point, they had those a couple years back - last year they were getting into vaporwave shirts and I‘ll admit I bought a few. like this’n.
target seems to be riding the internet wave faster than most companies, and their shirts are actually kind of neat. it's weird. They had this one too. it's sonic from a specific obscure japan-only commercial, filled with rings.
https://i.etsystatic.com/6785489/r/il/dc6f4c/1627962929/il_570xN.1627962929_k6oi.jpg
https://www.gamesniped.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/illusion-of-gaia-snes-t-shirt-sealed.jpg
