Sanshee: Wear the Culture

Every item we make has a story behind it; some more than others. I thought it might be neat to occasionally share those stories, and with its recent remake and Gilded edition there’s better design to begin than with the Welcome to Rapture shirt.
 

Fresh out of college, I invested my graduation card money on an Xbox360 and full Rock Band set. After all, student loans can wait. Eventually I discovered my five-hundred dollar Rock Band machine could also play video games, but where to begin? I hadn’t owned a console since N64. After asking a few people I picked up this “Bioshock” game and three days later I was sitting on the edge of my seat face two feet from the TV screen, teary-eyed and deeply touched by this marvelous game.

In the following year and half, I would hold a job at Gamestop where I would be teased by my coworkers for my being the guy who recommended Bioshock to pretty much every customer:

“Like Shooters?”
“Bioshock”
“Like Stories?”
“Bioshock”
“Suspsense/Horror?”
“Bioshock”
“6 years old?”
“Bioshock”

I was a straight up Bioshock pushing machine, and to my delight, many customers would return to thank me.

So Sanshee was just coming together as a thing at this time and I knew at one point I wanted to do something for Bioshock. I had some loose disconnected ideas, but nothing really pulled them together, until one day I was talking to one of my T-shirt vendor friends about Bioshock and he said he was planning on putting out a design with an unmasked Big Daddy with a Little Sister where, lo’ and behold, The Big Daddy was Pedobear.

Really? A pedobear crossover; for arguably one of the greatest example of art and gaming in this generation? It’s like saying “You know what would improve Michelangelo’s Pieta? Pedophilia.” If there’s a word for the combination of love and spite it’s most likely Germanic in origin, but that’s what fueled me try to make a design that I thought was a tribute to Bioshock.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m a pretty weak as an artist. I’m slow, clumsy, and lack any real anatomy or perspective skills, so it took me two weeks of nearly non-stop-some-times-forgetting-to-eat work to make the Welcome to Rapture design.  To add to my already arduous challenge, I had to rescue the design from rising waters as my the basement workspace flooded, but standing ankle deep in water, cradling my computer, I thought, “Well, this is appropriate”

This is the original concept sketch. It’s uh… something..

This is the same sketch after two weeks of photoshop.

So the design made it to completion and was printed the week of PAX East 2010, which I attending with a group of friends. They were following the Irrational twitter feed at the time and it turned out Irrational was giving out T-shirts. Awesome! I love free shirts and I love Bioshock, let’s roll! After collecting our poly-cotton swag bounty my friend said I should give them some of the Welcome to Rapture shirts to which I responded, “What if they sue!?”

To this day talking to industry people makes me a bit nervous, but back then I was downright a jittery nerveous mess by the time I found the Irrational crew.

Turns out they were really friendly and liked the design.

So I thought that was the best Irrational Games moment I would ever have, until one day, at a convention in Connecticut, a classy gal I'd later come to know as "Sarah" came by our booth and commented on our Welcome to Rapture shirt and Little Sister on Board sign. Turns out she worked at Irrational, so I gave her a few stickers and a sign, because you know, she's awesome. Later on she told me that Ken Levine himself enjoyed the sign.

So I thought that was the best Irrational Games moment I would have until PAX East 2011 where Sanshee presented in a subsection of the Game Universe booth. While I was away from the booth, an Irrational employee came by and said they liked our designs and that I should find him. So, I went up to their booth to see if I could find the employee. In the end I couldn’t find him, but the lead team from Bioshock was going to be doing a signing so I stayed and figured I could at least get my Little Sister on Board sign autographed. 

After a significant wait in line my turn arrived. While Ken Levine was signing the sign he said “You know, I have one of these, It’s great. Apparently a fan made it.”

To which my response was “Oh! That was me, I made it”

He then proceeded to tell me how much how much he enjoyed it and then brought over his wife to show her that I was the guy who made “That sign”

I’m not sure what causes spontaneous human combustion, but it’s probably moments like these.  So I told him I had some more stuff at the booth and I would love to give him one of our shirts, so I ran back to the booth and it went something like this:

Me:  I need a shirt for Ken Levine.
Person at booth: “Okay, What size?”
Me: All of them
Person at booth: What??
Me: *Runs off with pile of shirts*

I left a pile of Welcome to Rapture shirts and Little Sister on Board signs with an employee at the Irrational booth, and then took off, and that was pretty much it.

So, I thought that was the best Irrational Games moment I would have until one day during E3 2011, when a Sanshee fan sent me a facebook message.

Sanshee Fan: “Hey Ken Levine was wearing your shirt during an interview”
Me: “What?”
Sanshee Fan: “Yea, go see if you can find the video on Youtube. It was on Spike TV”
Me:  *Runs off with pile of shirts*

After a frenzied search for the clip, we eventually found it, and it blew our minds. There he was, at an interview, wearing the shirt. Even mentioned it. It couldn't possibly get better than this moment right here.

And then he wore the shirt on the main stage to present the Playstation Vita.

I ended up writing him a thank you letter and this was his response.

This line of encouragement here is one of the things that helps keep me working on things like Sanshee. Plus, the fact that Ken Levine takes any time out his day, y'know, making world-famous games that push gaming forward as an artistic medium, for a fan, makes him pretty damn awesome.

But, after all this, I felt that the Welcome to Rapture shirt as it was wasn’t worthy. I felt it could be better, so I began my search for an artist who could do the design justice, and I found that artist in Laura Scoby.

She began work on the design for PAX Prime 2011, and we continued tweaking the design after. It’s now at the point where we’re ready to retire the old design and send in the new, alongside some special “Gilded Age Rapture” shirts.

Both the new style and Gilded Age Rapture shirts are now available, and you can buy the last of the original design on sale here.

Though the original design is getting retired, it will always have a special place in my heart as it was done by a young clumsy artist who had a lot of love for a game he thought was awesome.