Software Companies Are Made Of People
A love letter to the customer service at Panic, Inc.
I don’t know about you, but the first thing I think of when I think of “quality tee shirt creators” is software development companies. I’m not talking about the standard “throw a logo on a polo” conference schwag or “donate enough money to express interest, but not purchase a full license” Kickstarter reward either, but actual quality passion projects that happen to manifest as clothing.
Years and years ago, I fell in love with the work of Keita Takahashi, a designer and director of some well known, and some not so well known, video games. While he became a household name (insofar as you live in a house that speaks frequently of people like Shigeru Miyamoto) for his work in creating Katamari Damacy, it was his follow-up “Noby Noby Boy” that I identified to a much greater extent.
Noby Noby Boy is a sandbox game in its truest sense, wherein there is no objective but to play, both literally and figuratively. To describe it is to experiment in documenting madness, but my elevator pitch is as follows: You are a worm-like creature, in a randomly generated world. You start out tiny, but with no effort at all, you can choose to stretch your small, worm-like body to be many feet long. Think of Wile E. Coyote’s body stretching across two separating cliffs.
The worm mechanic of Boy (one of a few named characters in the game) allows you to wrap around objects (houses, robots, dinosaurs, donuts, people with protest signs, bicycles), tie yourself into knots, and knock any of these objects off of the small plane of existence that you temporarily inhabit. Unlike the standard trope made popular in the Mario franchise, falling off of the edge of existence does not lead to death; careening off screen leads to you falling out of the sky back onto the plane (in the case of computer-controlled characters), or slowly writhing out of the smiling house’s chimney, whose anthropomorphized windows-as-eyes watch over you as your worm-form piles around its rainbow haircut (randomly selected from a wide variety upon the start of the game).
The lack of goals, consequences, beginning and end of Noby Noby Boy are the tip of the iceberg with regards to how post-narrative this game is. Created after the incredible success of the Katamari series, in interviews Takahashi described that this what he chose to do with the shackles of financial success, marketability, franchise concerns and the like contractually lifted from his back. The more I read about this game as it was in development, the more my interests were piqued.
After its release, in early 2009 I had enjoyed countless hours of Noby Noby Boy, contributing to the overall length of Girl (another named character, as well as a major plot point) and had in general confused many a friend with the game’s purpose (or lack there-of). As a result, it seemed only appropriate to figure out how to more efficiently introduce this absurdist art experiment disguised a video game to more people. And what better way to do so than by branding yourself with product marketing!
As much as the next person, I enjoy hiding graphic tee shirts under my dress shirt, and sought out clothing related to Noby Noby Boy. Strangely enough, this lead me to the software developer Panic, Inc.
While I know of Panic as the developer of Transmit (which I’ve used since Mac OS 8.x), they had a lesser-known side business in selling physical goods, and have been a repeat collaborator with Keita Takahashi. Much like they did for the Katamari launch, Panic was selling a variety of tee shirts for the new game. Their Noby Noby Boy graphic shirts depicted the protagonists in all sorts of knots: simple, nonsensical, available in a variety of sizes. I purchased 24' Girl (pink hearts on black) and 144' Boy (a black pile of spaghetti on light grey).
The Noby Noby Boy shirts quickly became a staple of my wardrobe.
As the years went by, the shirts I had purchased would continue to keep me as entertained as the game would. While the silk-screened ink slowly cracked and gathered a patina not unlike that favorite concert shirt you refuse to throw away (or in my case, an Air “The Virgin Suicides” promotional tee shirt I got when my friend Travis dragged me to the Madonna “Music” midnight release sale in the Magnificent Mile in Chicago in 2000), 24' Girl and 144' Boy held up their end of the bargain like the best of them. I thought I could keep this up indefinitely, that is until my girlfriend decided that it made sense to wash her maroon pants from Morocco with our light clothing.
The carnage of the laundry post-wash was completely predictable: towels with red edges, athletic socks that had turned pink, white shirts with stained collars replaced with a tie-dyed aesthetic not that uncommon in the Grateful Dead circuit. Amongst the wreckage in the load, there laid my 144' Boy, its faded grey background color replaced with a hilarious abstract Rorschach test in rouge.
In secret, Marla attempted to figure out where the shirt was from to replace it, but couldn’t read the tag, long since faded into illegibility. Putting her librarian taxonomy skills to work, she began scouring the web for whatever she could determine that the shirt was about, constructing sensible queries using the information she had available:
- Two headed snake video game
- Double headed snake
- Knotted snake
- Tangled snake cartoon video game two heads
The internet, and its promise of always available instant gratification, had completely failed her. Even after figuring out the title, numerous other searches wrought the same result: nothing.
For an eternity, the shirt hung defeated by the washer. At some point thereafter, I had relayed the origin story at Panic, and that was all Marla needed to launch another stealth attack on her tee shirt resurrection project.
Many weeks later, I came home to a package on the coffee table with my name on it. Marla remarked nonchalantly that I should open the nearly destroyed cardboard box, and as I peeled away the packing tape, I was totally dumbfounded as to how I was staring at 4 new Noby Noby Boy shirts.
My straight-faced appreciation for this amazing happening didn’t quite capture my enthusiasm or happiness that I was feeling on the inside. It isn’t every day that your favorite heirloom multiplies itself by 4x, so I’m not sure that I quite know what the proper reaction is to such a situation. Nevertheless, like Jean Luc Picard in Chain of Command, I was able to declare that there were 4 [shirts] in front of me.
From what I’ve been able to piece together, Marla called Panic, and started right in with the ridiculous request “I know this is going to sound strange, but I ruined my boyfriend’s favorite tee shirt…” or something to that nature. I’ve never been to the Panic office in sunny Portland, but no doubt that the customer service department is right next to the clever icon creation desk, in between the wall of status screens, the full-time manned espresso bar, the bike rack for frames welded within a 20 mile radius and apparently the 5+ year old tee shirt side business warehouse. After a few minutes on hold, June, the amazing employee on the other end of the line, said yes, in fact, they did have some of the old shirts laying about, and she’d be happy to send them to her. Information was exchanged, pleasantries abounded, and the call ended.
The coincidence that we live on a street whose name is commonly abbreviated was apparently lost on the postal service on the day these shipped, and the package was returned to sender. Unfortunately, June was on vacation at that particular moment, and so on her desk the package sat, unattended and unloved, wedged in between some locally raised hydroponic civet coffee and a Damascus steel pedal wrench, for just shy of an eternity.
Upon June’s return, she immediately got in contact with Marla. USPS’ feedback, poorly scrawled on the surface of the package, was relayed over the phone. The two of them hatched a new plan: deliver the package to the school where Marla worked, with an infinitely less ambiguous address to send to. A few days later, and there I was receiving the bounty, ecstatic to the gills.
I still don’t know why Panic decided that they should make tee shirts. Perhaps, as my brother (a recent Portland resident himself) put it, it’s because everyone in Portland makes tee shirts. Or perhaps it’s just because they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Keita Takahashi, and wanted to help a friend of a friend of a friend get his products more well known in America (despite being published by Namco). What I do know though is that it is amazing in this day and age that someone can pick up the phone, make such an unbelievable request for a dead-stock item that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and have such a wonderful result.
Thank you June, and Panic, Inc.
