Comment by jaredandrews | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaredandrews | Hacker News Reader

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These sort of artifacts are fascinating. It reminds me of a t-shirt I saw a man wearing in Thailand in 2012. I was in rural Isan and spotted a Thai man wearing a t-shirt with an image of the falling towers, above the towers were portraits of Bush and Bin Laden with text like "Bush VS Bin Laden".

I never saw a copy of this shirt again in Thailand (which was strange because Bangkok has many, many t-shirt stalls filled with shirts that would be controversial in the west). I googled it and discovered that there were actually many variations on this shirt[0], but I never saw the same design as the one the man was wearing.

Weirdly, this mystery was sorta solved for me this year. A Rudy Giuliani parody account I follow on Instagram posted an image of this controversial handheld game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laden_VS_USA

The image featured on the game is the exact same one I saw on the shirt. And yes, several people on YouTube have acquired and played copies of this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XNJM_Kamyg&t=142s

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=bin+laden+vs+bush+shirt&tbm=...

> controversial handheld game

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, an unlicensed Game Boy Color game called "Terrifying 9/11" was released, which uses the attack as a central plot point, despite the game essentially being a port of Metal Slug. The quality of the port is actually quite good which leads some to speculate that it's based on an unreleased port by SNK.

It actually has perhaps one of the most impressive examples of video (or something close to it) I've ever seen on the Game Boy. I get the feeling that the game creators didn't mean to cause offense but simply wanted to use the attacks to add context or "plot" in other words.

More info: https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/Terrifying_911

Full gameplay (Chinese version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq7Vlk2r-eo

Off Khao San Road, one or two streets across there was one seller of Bin Laden t-shirts and masks in 2003. He was kinda famous. Got shutdown some point later. Neutral shirts. Just had a nice picture of Bin Laden with his name, might have had the Vs. Not sure if you are saying there were a lot of "controversial in the West" T-Shirts in Thailand about 9-11 or in general, but by end of 2003 he was the only one I could find for 9-11.

Pic, I don't wear them out much - https://imgur.com/a/NK8P9ot

A similar phenomenon happened in Brazil in the extremely polarized 2018 presidential elections: https://store.steampowered.com/app/930460/BOLSOMITO/

It would be similar if the game was about the (fake) stabbing.

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