Why the Dark Souls Clothing Release was the Greatest Twitter Event of the Year

Right, Dark Souls.

It’s the big thing at the moment with the third instalment dropping to reasonably good reviews amongst some kerfuffle over the release date. Personally I’ve never been into the series, but I can appreciate what it’s doing, and I applaud Miyazaki for somehow managing to convince the entire gaming community to refer to its gameplay as ‘learning from your mistakes’ rather than ‘trial and error’ in an elite bit of marketing spin worthy of Malcolm Tucker.

But the fans. Talk all you want about how great a community they are because they’ve wasted years of their lives making wikis and would miss the birth of their child to beat New Game+++, but there’s something about them to the outsider that makes them somewhat annoying. It’s not necessarily due to hostility (although there are some insufferable fuckwads who will accuse anyone not willing to put up with obtuse game design as some sort of second class citizen) but rather how worthy some of them act about being Souls fans at all. Many of them give off the impression that they’re somehow better than other gamers for sinking their time into the series and that they’re making gaming better by their very presence, oblivious to the fact that they’re still just sitting on the sofa in their pants pressing buttons to make lights appear on a screen in a desperate attempt to escape from the soul-crushing reality of the outside world. There’s a self-seriousness about much of the fanbase which is almost comical at times.

All of this was why it was absolutely brilliant to see the crushing blow that Dark Souls’ publishers delivered to them today with an absolutely classic bit of news manipulation. April 7th. Bandai-Namco’s Twitter account sends out a seductive ‘come hither’ to the community. “We have some big Dark Souls news tomorrow! Stay tuned!” Instantly Twitter and NeoGaf run awash with speculation. DLC? Early release date? Original Dark Souls remaster? Excitement builds as the next day dawns. What delicious treat was the mother bird about to regurgitate into the mouths of her chicks? (Don’t question my metaphors)

And then at 12:35 GMT on the 8th, Bandai-Namco released the news. And what was it? A collection of shitty looking T-Shirts and hoodies being put on sale adorned with various Dark Souls ‘memes’. Absolutely biblical stuff, with the fanbase staggering dazed and confused at the sheer naffness of the reveal. The Twitter response was fantastic, as angry and bemused fans threw more shit at Bandai-Namco than an entire barrel of perturbed monkeys.

One user described the affair as “pissing on a great game”. A simple and well thought out “I hate you people” was the response of another. Even better was seeing people try to weakly defend it, trying to say that this did in fact deserve the moniker of ‘big news’ and that the REAL fans would be ‘stoked’ about it. One even managed to fit the good old Dark Souls superiority complex into their reply, with this hero replying that they would only buy clothing produced by ‘dedicated independent artists’ as they sipped on their artisanal locally sourced coffee in a miasma of smugness and deeply repressed self-loathing.

So I salute Bandai-Namco for both a wondrous piece of piss-boiling on a fanbase that could do to take itself a little less seriously and for producing one of the 21st centuries most fascinating pieces of conceptual art in the backlash. PRAISE THE SUN.