a long time ago I was working on a game. in an alternate universe this is perhaps a beautiful finished game. everybody loves it.
however in this universe it is a still unfinished game, for lo and behold I was derailed and suffered a gruesome fate.
I had been playing too much Dark Souls. I’m one of those people that love character creation systems. I casually thought to myself “well my game should have a deep creation system! why not!?”
this casual decision brought me untold woe and eventually resulted in the pointless but well named app FAKEME.
FAKEME was to be the core piece of a series of games I was going to create. so in FAKEME you would create your characters, which would then populate FAKEME games.
so not only are you creating your character, you are creating the other characters as well. want to make a Zombie Santa clone where you battle Hitler and the Jonas Brothers? this was going to be well within the means of the FAKEME universe. sounds pretty neat typing it out again but remember I’m just this person that works in this small room on a computer and my wrist hurts, like, all the time.
by the time I was done with FAKEME I was done. there would be no FAKEME world of games. I’ve often astounded myself with how wrong I can be, and the entire FAKEME experience toed that line.
I am always wrong.
over a year later and I still hadn’t finished that game but I had started to get more and more into designing t-shirts. the increasing quality of direct to garment printing and providers like Printful had changed the game.
no longer were you ordering screenprinted shirts that nobody would buy, you were simply designing shirts that nobody would buy— an important distinction!
the first exhumation of FAKEME body parts came with my ode to walking outside “HIKING!”.
FAKEME having been buried for so long it was pleasant to be getting any sort of mileage out of what had felt like a thankless development cycle.
more FAKEME leverage followed, landlord grim reapers and happy face barbarian babes, in the back of my head a group scene started to form.
could it be I was having fun using FAKEME tech?
I made a love letter to Orange Caramel. I think I was having fun, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to look at the remains of FAKEME let alone utilize them.
I had been watching a lot of 80s movies with fantastic hair that had put holes into the ozone.
I love old concert t-shirts, I wanted to make my own, I wanted to take FAKEME in my hand and all that misguided effort and squeeze so hard I wanted to rub CBD into my wrist and keep telling myself it was getting better.
and so the Fake Cats were born, remembered here in their 1983 glory. and from the bones of a misguided character creation and sharing application comes a deep reservoir of fuel for sofake t-shirts.
god that’s wordy, I don’t like it all. what I’m trying to say is I thought I’d wasted all that time, but remember I told you earlier, I am always wrong.
at the time of publishing the Fake Cats destroyed t-shirt is the best selling sofake shirt of all time.