Target has your indie games / Tees

Indie games in the mainstream!

I'm wicked impressed, and want to file this under "little guys with great marketing concept make good".

2D Boy -- "a brave new indie game studio based in San Francisco, making games the old fashioned way - a team of two, no money, and a whole lot of 'love'" -- has struck a deal with retailers (Target stores being possibly first out of the gate).

You can buy independent game game T-shirts, which come with a demo or full version of the game, for like $12.

A bunch of the titles are a la the Experimental Gameplay Project (clothing company egp apparel looks to be an offshoot of the effort), and this is a slick way to get indie cred mainstream recognition (the tags talk quite a bit about the games and creators).

More info at the 2D Boy Website, and (interestingly) waaay more info at Kevin Allen's blog.

Gary Gygax, dead at 69

Gary Gygex, Co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died in his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, at 69 years old.

There's probably a hit points joke in there somewhere, but I'm just too saddened by our loss of another creative entrepreneur.

Whatever your feeling about D&D, fellow creative Warren Spector maybe sums it up best (for me):

"what most folks don't appreciate is how special, how ground-breaking it was as the first medium of expression to turn anyone who played into a storyteller, into an author, into a creator. Not a bad legacy for a pioneering game guy..."