Wondering what’s been keeping Venus Patrol relatively radio-silent the past couple months? Here’s one big reason: Thursday, June 13th, concurrent with this year’s E3 expo, the site will be partnering with MOCAtv, the video channel of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to present HORIZON, a press conference that will highlight a lineup of beautiful games as an alternative to what we’ve come to expect from standard E3 fare.

While we’re still keeping a tight lid on what the actual lineup will entail, the conference will present games from studios both small and large, and will showcase new looks at and details about some games you may have already heard of, as well as brand new games from some of your favorite developers, and very possibly some super secret new surprises that will be entirely unexpected.

If you’re a member of the press, invites to the event will be headed your way shortly — so save the date now — email horizon@venuspatrol.com if you’re especially excited about attending and we’ll do what we can to make sure you’re there!

The genesis of HORIZON came as Cory Schmitz (who is, of course, behind the fantastic HORIZON design) & I sat at home streaming last year’s string of E3 press conferences and instantly decided to “light a candle, rather than curse the darkness” and try to put together the E3 experience we wanted to see in the world.

Through the organizational help and guidance of Double Fine‘s Greg Rice, Mathew Kumar, and especially the involvement of MOCAtv and curator Sarah Brin (who also helped organize the super excellent Ahhhcade exhibition at SFMOMA during this year’s Game Developers Conference), we think we’re putting together something very exciting, which we hope will stand out and become a new E3 tradition.

We’ll have much more to say about HORIZON in the coming weeks — we hope you’ll start looking forward to this as much as we are!

It’s time for that little link at the top to shine a little brighter: I’m very pleased to announce that the Venus Patrol Shop is now, finally, open for business, which also brings even better news — the official, worldwide release of Keita Takahashi’s Videogame Romantics T-shirts.

In addition to the remaining “Sunset” stock we originally made available at our Wild Rumpus / Venus Patrol GDC Party, we’re also introducing two new colorways: “Octopus”, with pink on heather-purple, and “Treasure”, with sparkly gold on black (which, to Keita’s dismay, is not made of actual gold).

The Venus Patrol Shop is also currently stocked with a small selection of other items from friends of the site, including T-shirts, prints and zines from artists & writers like Maré Odomo, Cory Schmitz, Zac Gorman and Mathew Kumar. You’ll even find a few super-premium items in stock, like these hand-woven scarves featuring art from Faraway creator Steph Thirion’s debut game Eliss.

Be sure to let Keita & I know how you like the shirts! Photos for our scrapbook/future Tumblr posts can be submitted care of that Submit link at top. And overall, I genuinely hope you like what you see at the store, and thanks much to our superpals at Fangamer for all the hard work they put into making it a real thing — stay tuned for news on many more things I’m working on bringing to it in the coming months!

Art director Cory Schmitz filters Sound Shapes through Warhol in this new wallpaper for the game available via his site & produced in promotion of a new official Sound Shapes tumblr meant to highlight the best of the game’s user-generated levels.

While the latter site seems to have suddenly gone dark over the weekend, it’s still worth a follow in anticipation of whatever future updates are in store.

Queasy Games & its associated Sound Shapes partners celebrate the wrap and release of the game (an easy contender for one of the best of 2012) with this screen-printed cinema-style poster designed by art director (and Venus Patrol designer!) Cory Schmitz, that for now remains unavailable to the outside world and ridiculously covetable.