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Inspired by the ritual of
late-90s basketball gaming — from loading screens and instruction manuals to physical media and playground culture
— Fake LIVE 98 rebuilds the feeling of owning the game, not simply playing it.
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Fake LIVE 98 exists inside FC Sports Archive — a fictional preservation system created to catalog products, media and sports mythology as recovered cultural artifacts.
Building The Visual Language
Fake LIVE 98 was designed as a complete release rather than a standalone garment. The game disc, manual, apparel and Archive Edition packaging were developed as interdependent artifacts, each extending the same fictional 1998 release into a different physical format.
The visual system was built by studying the graphic language surrounding late-90s basketball games — not only the software itself, but packaging, magazine previews, instruction manuals, ratings systems, hardware icons and advertising. Those conventions were reconstructed into a fictional FC Sports universe designed to feel period-authentic without becoming a direct replica.
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The archive concept was carried through physical production using holographic packaging, printed inserts, game-media references and serialized collector details. Prototypes were tested at actual garment-fold scale before the final package was assembled as a contemporary product designed to feel like recovered late-90s media.
The T-shirt was approached as a piece of game media rather than conventional merchandise.
The front functions like a title screen or box cover; the back borrows the information density of late-90s game packaging, combining screenshots, feature callouts, technical specifications and period-style promotional language.
Campaign assets extended the fiction beyond product photography into the media ecosystem that would have surrounded an actual 1998 game release — magazine previews, advertisements, gameplay claims, developer commentary and fictional editorial coverage. The campaign was designed to make audiences momentarily question whether Fake LIVE 98 had actually existed
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