The single R-Type shirt has actually been available for a while, but we’re showing it anyway. Not because you can’t buy it outside of Japan (none of it is on the English site) and that it’s sold out, but because it’s so great.

The new stuff, however, is part of KoG’s Spelunker line and adds to the existing t-shirt by introducing a range of hoodies (top). And “Weakest Explorer” aside, they’re as refined, subtle and tasteful as you’d expect from such a pricey outfit.

アイレムから発売された名作スペランカー、R-TYPE をフューチャー！ [KoG]

The Mishka NYC × Brütal Legend collaboration not only gives metal-heads an opportunity to proudly display their love of all things Tim Schafer on their torsos, it draws upon real thrash and metal credibility.

The above “Headbanger” tee features the gory result of Ironheade’s head-banging foot soldiers in a design crafted by artist James Callahan, known for his work with bands like Municipal Waste. The second, featuring a Brütal Legend Razorgirl riding a Fire Beast, is all ’70s metal fantasy, courtesy of Daniel Mumford, known for his work with Black Dahlia Murder.

Keep watch for opportunities — right here on Kotaku, for example — to get your hands on these tees.

And I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time.

Looking back, the timing of founding Meat Bun, our video game-themed t-shirt line, makes sense. It started in Tokyo, following an afternoon pounding the pavement in Harajuku, a fashionable slice of Tokyo nestled between Shinjuku and Shibuya. The area attracts the fashion conscious, from outlandish cosplayers to street fashion freaks.

Harajuku is also home to one of our biggest influences, Beams T, a Japanese label that somehow manages to make the stereotypically uncool — including video games, anime and manga — cool. It was after shopping at Beams T, where I purchased an Every Extend Extra t-shirt, lamenting that we’d missed out on the label’s Dragon Quest anniversary line of tees and bemoaning the fact that shirts from The King of Games were hard to get in the US that the idea of making our own clothes, video game-themed ones, started to gel.

It was just days before the Tokyo Game Show. Wedged between the t-shirt shopping and the promise of playing dozens of unreleased video games, the whole thing seemed like a good idea.

Our goal? To tap into the hard to define culture of video games, a medium which we had been passionate about for decades, and create something that was better than what we were being offered. And we weren’t the only ones with that idea. Similarly passionate video game fans, those raised on 8-bit and 16-bit games were doing the same thing, like the people behind Panic, J!NX, Attract Mode, Starmen.net and its spin-off Fangamer, and many others.

So after foolishly deciding on the name Meat Bun — inspired by a life-giving pick up from Capcom’s unpopular side-scrolling arcade beat ‘em up Warriors of Fate — we set off to clothe gamers.

My partner in clothing is Scott Spatola, a lifelong gamer who originally introduced himself to me after learning that I’d brought a SNES and a copy of Street Fighter II to university, against my parents wishes. The aforementioned arm-twister Scott has always been the motivator, a rabid fan of Spy Hunter, Ninja Warriors and Darkstalkers, and the other half of this full-time-feeling side-project dubbed Meat Bun.

It always helps to have a friend like Scott, one who’s organised enough to undertake the business side of the business — setting up the bank accounts, doing all the tax stuff, legally incorporating the company. There are just shy of a million little things that crop up in the process of starting one’s own business.

“I always said that if anyone ever asked, I’d tell them that starting your own business is f—king hard, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” says Sean “Jinx” Gailey, the creative overlord at clothier and accessory maker J!NX. “Real blood, sweat and tears (also real) have gone into this business.”

But J!NX has turned those hard-lost fluids into a successful brand and, perhaps more importantly, a full-time gig for its founders.

“Frankly, the biggest challenge was getting over the ‘hump’, making that transition from working your day job to solely working on your own business,” Gailey says. “Anyone who’s working on their own business can relate to that. We didn’t take a pay cheque from J!NX for five years of business, during the ‘this is our side business’ days. That was rough.”

J!NX has been in business since 1999, when Gailey started the company “as a three-page website with six designs” running the label from his bedroom. We met Gailey at last year’s Spike TV Video Game Awards bending his ear about the J!NX empire, which, while different from what we had set out to do with Meat Bun, reflected a similar passion for video games and general nerdiness, coated with a cooler shell.

“I wanted to make clothing inspired by our lifestyle, one of video games, pen and paper gaming, geek culture, giant robots, comics and dragons,” Gailey says of the origins of J!NX. The clothing company has grown from a bedroom doubling as headquarters to an operation employing 21 people, occupying 1672sqm of office and warehouse space, and making merchandise for hugely popular games like World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, StarCraft, Aion and EVE Online.

And while not quite understated, for the most part, what J!NX does is offer something to the fan of, say, World of Warcraft that’s designed with more of a wink and a nod.

From the barely referential designs from Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy t-shirt maker Panic to the Earthbound obsessed crew at Fangamer — borne of Starmen.net — the subtle approach appears to be a common tactic. For our own part, ultra vague references to The House of the Dead, Ikaruga and Spy Hunter seemed sometimes lost on the Meat Bun customer.

Reid Young of Fangamer says the company draws much of its inspiration from the Super Nintendo’s role-playing game heyday for its similarly obscure designs.

“EarthBound and other SNES RPGs have definitely been our main inspiration,” Young says, a fact reflected in the clothing label’s EarthBound-heavy catalogue. “1996 was pretty much the best summer ever — Chrono Trigger, EarthBound and Super Mario RPG from morning to midnight. It’s fun to relive those days and hopefully inspire new and old fans to do the same.”

While the Fangamer store — “Something we hoped would bring in enough money to keep the lights on” over at Fangamer’s community-driven side — is now the “main business focus”, according to Young, employing three full-time Starmen.net veterans, running a clothing and merchandise label exceeded the EarthBound fans’ expectations.

“I never anticipated the amount of work which goes into a single piece of merchandise,” says Young. “It sounds easy to slap a design on a shirt, but the amount of time, money and care that goes into the process is staggering.”

Fan response, Young says, makes the grind of shipping thousands of Mother 3-inspired handbooks and t-shirts all worth it.

“Releasing a product, going to sleep, and waking up to find that everybody is as pumped about it as I am. It brings a little tear to my eye,” he says.

The J!NX Aion line follows the company’s recent journeys into the universe of EVE Online, and while those shirts are certainly attractive enough, they make me think of mining ore and falling asleep at my desk. The Aion shirts, on the other hand, make me want to give up my habit of wearing a button-up shirt over a t-shirt in order to show off my plumage. I have always wanted plumage.

Check out the full J!NX Aion line at the company’s website, and be sure to check out the Dungeons & Dragons page as well, because there is nothing as beautiful as a t-shirt that says “Rock Me Asmodeus”.

This shirt is based on the upcoming DS game Tingle’s Love Balloon Trip, the sequel to 2006’s never-released-in-America Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland.

Not much more to add to that, really. You either agree that The Love Is Mightier Than The Sword, or you don’t.

[Tingle @ King of Games]

Just take a look at Ecko’s new range of Halo shirts, featuring six designs that you would expect to see adorning an unlicensed beach towel in a South-East Asian marketplace. You certainly wouldn’t expect to see them on a t-shirt that costs $US32. Or $US38, even, which is the ludicrous price two of them are listed at.

Ecko Halo [Ecko, via Giant Bomb]

There’s six shirts in the line, some heavy on the Pokemon, others heavier on a freaky, Pokemonised version of the trademark Ape. No word on a release or pricing, but since the last Nintendo/Bape shirts ran to $US175, don’t expect to see them for $US15 at Hot Topic.

Bape x Pokemon [World Famous Design Junkies, via Pink Tentacle]

To be given away free to advertise Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, it appears at first glance to be part of “the rule”; a rubbish black t-shirt doing nothing but blandly advertising a video game. But there’s a trick.

Boo! Nice touch, Capcom.

Finally, after numerous requests, we’ve added roomier extra extra large sizes, so towering Fahey-proportioned types with a penchant for sporting their video game fandom on their sleeves can feel more comfortable. That includes the new stuff, like the Famicom-coloured Nintendo Four shout out and the newer, velvetier Agro Polo homage.

Attendees of the Kotaku E3 2009 party got a sneak peek at this stuff months ago, but our new stuff is now available to the general public at the online store. Have at it!

Meat Bun Online Store [Meat Bun]

The four shirts are pretty hit and miss, but man, that Balrog shirt is a hit. Apparently these are still waiting on final approval from Cave Story creator Pixel, but it’d be a coldhearted man to turn down a shirt giving us a look inside one of the greatest square robots of all time.

[Tiny Cartridge]