Still Can’t Quit

I used to tell myself I’d quit World of Warcraft after a couple months. That was in 2005. Every night I disappeared into Azeroth. Every morning I knew I should stop and knew I wouldn’t. The thing about games that grab you that deep is they never really let go.

I thought I was past it. Then I saw a Uniqlo collaboration with Blizzard—StarCraft, Overwatch, all of it on t-shirts—and it hit me that everything I felt is still there. That world is still waiting.

The designs are actually good. Not cynical merch. Someone who played those games designed them. Someone who understood what a fan would want to wear.

You can walk around wearing a Blizzard shirt and it doesn’t mean the same thing as it did in 2005. Back then you were admitting something pathological, a secret. Now it’s just pop culture. But I miss when it was mine, when nobody else understood or cared. That sense of knowing something others didn’t.

I’ll probably never buy the shirt. But every time I see it, I remember exactly how my apartment smelled at three in the morning. How certain I was that I was ruining my life. How much I didn’t care.