Day 336

Back on Day 318 of my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE T-shirt challenge I regaled you all with my tale of discovering a Sega Master System in my home for the first time, and more essentially, Alex Kidd leaping around enthusiastically at my brother's will on the TV screen. I'd never seen anything like it before.

Alex Kidd (アレックスキッド) became the official mascot of Sega in the 1980's and his adventures in Miracle World were hard-wired into the console.
Like most Japanese exports, the concept of the platform/roleplay game was exceptionally odd, and will appear even more convoluted in my account from memory now. He was a jumpsuit-wearing monkey-like chap who woke up one morning to find an old bloke at his front door whining on about how the prince and princess of his land had been imprisoned in a castle far far away (text book fantasy royalty behaviour). For no discernible reason, Alex took it upon himself to single handedly rescue those captive by embarking on a long and auto-save-free adventure through levels of densely confusing landscape that each lasted a decade. His primary weapons were his oversized fists. Occasionally he'd be in a Pedicopter which could sporadically fire ammunition in a cack-handed fashion at any and all objects on screen. It was useless.
He would run and jump, traversing ravines and avoiding pitfalls, punching parrots and frogs on their beaks and snouts respectively (the enemies of the game were essentially just local wildlife that in reality posed absolutely no threat whatsoever) until he reached the end of each 2D plain where the player would be rewarded with a two frame animation of Alex enjoying a hamburger inexplicably left on the ground.
The Big Boss fights (there were always Big Boss fights in the 8bit days) were perplexing. Mutated henchmen with giant hands for faces would appear every so often and challenge Alex to a ferocious battle of Rock, Scissors, Paper, of which there were two outcomes. One - remember the sequence from the last time you played, execute it, and grow impatient at the battle music taking forever when you already knew you'd beaten the guy, or two - lose the game because you were being cocky with the selection cycling button, chose the wrong hand gesture, and have your life extinguished. That's right. You died from losing a simple game of Rock, Scissors, Paper. The Big Boss didn't kill you, you just keeled over at the shame of positioning your hand incorrectly. Most abstract indeed.

I'm able to recount these memories in great detail because Alex Kidd became an integral part of my childhood frame work. I was very passionate about that game growing up, so when Martin at Slippy Tee invited me to select a T-shirt from his range of old-skool gaming designs to wear for my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge, it was a no-brainer that I'd choose this blazing red garment featuring the Sega hero.

OK, so I may have emailed Martin around 25 times at the excitement of browsing some absolute belters among the range on the Slippy Tee website, but ultimately I landed on this tee, celebrating the sprite in all his pixelated glory.

See more from Slippy Tee via Martin's Twitter account.