Garments from the Worlds That Ruined Me

There are moments—fewer now than before, but they still happen—when I want to close every tab, let every obligation quietly expire, and play World of Warcraft again the way I did for a few months in 2005, before I understood what it was doing to me. Those were genuinely beautiful months. I was somewhere else entirely. The real world had a door, and I had stopped using it.

Uniqlo and Blizzard released a T-shirt collaboration covering the main Blizzard universes: StarCraft, Overwatch, and the aforementioned World of Warcraft. The designs are better than they need to be—actual illustration rather than licensed product, with enough craft in them to work as objects in their own right. The Azeroth imagery in particular hits correctly: epic without being overwrought, readable to anyone who spent time there, sufficiently opaque to everyone else that you don’t look like a walking advertisement for your own nostalgia.

There’s something slightly funny about wearing a World of Warcraft shirt in physical space—a garment from the world you retreated into to escape the world you’re currently standing in. Merch from the reality that runs parallel to this one, the one with better stats and a clearer sense of purpose. Available at Uniqlo stores. I’m buying at least one. The year is 2005 somewhere, still.