It’s been a very good season for Metal Gear fans. After the release of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection V. 1 in October, the second volume and a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 are slated for a 2024 drop.
To add to the game series’ 35th birthday celebrations, UNIQLO is releasing its archived Metal Gear Solid t-shirts, first released in 2009 and 2012.
And you've gotta admit that they’re pretty cool even if you never beat any of the classic games on European Extreme.
The six t-shirts, released under the UNIQLO UT Archive umbrella — a sub-label within the UNIQLO UT line of graphic T-shirts — honor Hideo Kojima's iconic gaming franchise with motifs borrowed directly from the franchise's early games, including concept art images Solid Snake, a pixelized MGS-era Snake in action, and even the original title's “game over” screen with Japanese text.
For a video game t-shirt, they’re rather elegant, to be honest, though we are in the era in which gamer gear is starting to get particularly stylish. Sometimes.
The UNIQLO UT Archive was born in 2022 to celebrate the Japanese retailer’s 20th birthday as part of an 18-t-shirt project, many celebrating famous anime like Naruto.
The nice thing about UNIQLO’s UT T-shirt collections is that it focuses on fairly high-quality merch, as opposed to a shirt you might get from a random vendor at Comic-Con.
The consistency is what earns UNIQLO frequent collaborations with big-name franchises like Hello Kitty all while it dishes respectable fashion goods with imprints like Marimekko and New York's Engineered Garments.
Obviously, UNIQLO's gaming merch like these re-released Metal Gear Solid shirts naturally follows suit.
If you are or love a gamer, these UNIQLO tee’s celebrating Metal Gear’s 35th anniversary are it.
Right now, only UNIQLO Japan has plans to restock the resurrected Metal Gear Solid collection, which launches domestically on January 22, but that could change given the far-off release of the next volume of the Master Collection (no release date) and remake of Metal Gear: Snake Eater for PlayStation 5 (expected by end of year, 20 years after the original's debut).
Typically, UNIQLO releases things in Japan before giving its products an international rollout so that'd make sense. Stake out your local UNIQLO store come February, but leave the cardboard box at home.
