Here’s some hopefully happy news for folks who couldn’t manage to make it out to That Party — the Venus Patrol Shop has just been refreshed & our new Legend of Romantics T-shirt is now shipping worldwide!

The shirt’s the latest in Keita Takahashi & Venus Patrol’s ‘Videogame Romantics’ line & comes in two colorways: MIDNIGHT (above), which features glow in the dark ink that lets the stars & ‘legendary objects’ shine through the evening…

…and ATHLETICS, printed navy on heather-grey — perfect for jogging or whichever calisthenic endeavor you personally prefer.

If you pick up one of the new shirts or already have, don’t forget to add yourself to the Wall of Romantics by submitting a selfie here!

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And here’s one more surprise that will be making its debut at next Wednesday’s Venus Patrol & Wild Rumpus party: a brand new T-shirt in Keita Takahashi & Venus Patrol’s ‘Videogame Romantics’ line.

The new ‘Legend of Romantics’ T-shirt will be available in two colorways to start. MIDNIGHT (above) will feature glow in the dark ink that’ll let the stars & ‘legendary objects’ shine through the evening.

The other colorway we’ve dubbed ATHLETICS, and will be printed navy on heather-grey, perfect for jogging or whichever calisthenic endeavor you personally prefer.

Once again, the T-shirts will be available through the Venus Patrol Shop, powered by Fangamer, a few weeks after they make their debut at the party’s Fangamer booth (which’ll again be stocked with a whole bunch of rad stuff!).

At the same time (finally!), we’ll also be refreshing the online shop with some reprints of the original Videogame Romantics T-shirt, which have long been sold out in pretty much every women’s size since last year’s party.

I hope you dig the shirt’s quiet romance as much as I do, and look forward to more KT x VP merch coming in 2014!

For reasons not necessarily worth bringing up here, I’ve spent much of the past few post-HORIZON weeks laid up & shut-in, which would have been driven me much crazier than it has were it not for the fortuitous timing of the release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Like basically everyone else I know, the past few weeks I’ve been living dual lives in both the real world and in The Village, and, as time has worn on, those two realities have started to happily merge, as a bunch of friendly artists & game fans have brought our favorite bits of the former into the latter.

Above, via Media Center blogger Michael Pang, you’ll find the keys to unlock your very own in-game version of Keita Takahashi’s Videogame Romantics shirt, and below the fold, you can find a number of other amazing submissions from indie game & comic culture to make your Village life feel a little bit more like home.

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A week or so on, I wanted to give a quick update from both Keita & me, to say many thanks for everyone that’s supported the Videogame Romantics project so far, and to announce this little site I had a wild hare to put together over the weekend: WeAreVideogameRomantics.com, a mega-site of everyone who’s joined our league to express their “naïve, pure, wonderful, and silly Love“.

If you’ve already received your order — or were one of the many who bought one of the T-shirts at our GDC party this year — we’d love to have you submit a photo of yourself wearing the shirt, as a couple of you already have! You can do so here (it even works directly from your iPhone library through some manner of tumblr magic) — and hopefully soon enough we can crowd out the random package shots I added with some real actual human faces. We look forward to seeing you there!

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!

I should probably slow down a bit with the Big Announcements, but there’s just too much to get through before everything explodes next week, so here’s One More Big One: in addition to the debut of Tenya Wanya Teens, our March 27th GDC party will also see the release of a new T-shirt designed by Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi.

The ‘Videogame Romantics’ shirt, inspired by Takahashi’s speech featured on Venus Patrol a few months back, will be released at the party in the ‘Sunset’ colorway pictured above, in a very limited edition that will be exclusive to that one night.

Following the party, the shirt will be the first item available worldwide on the Venus Patrol Shop — long teased in that top bar, but now actually coming soon in partnership with our superpals at Fangamer — in two new colorways, and probably even more colorways after those sell through, and then, hopefully, branching out into many more new designs after this.

Until then, if you want to fly your fellow Videogame Romantic freak flag in those colors above, I would suggest literally like bee-lining to the Fangamer booth at our party on March 27th as soon as possible, because I honestly don’t think they’re going to last long.