Mistigris World Tour - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

In an attempt to boost our sagging profile, from late 1996 through mid 1997 we undertook the Mistigris World Tour, where every month we packed up all of our contributors and their recent creations and showcased them en masse as temporary guests in other groups' artpacks, like a large and jolly gang of creatively-inclined party crashers. The decay in the scene all around us was apparent as several of the groups we made arrangements with (eg. [Ophidiac], [TeklordZ]) dissolved before we could reach them with our life-giving art, but nevertheless we managed to successfully undertake this collaborative nomadic endeavour with a handful of fellow travellers for half a year (notably including the Blade Nation, [Fistful of Steel], a revived and ascendant Fire Graphics, and Dark Illustrated) before we felt we had achieved enough exposure to new audiences and resumed making releases under our own banner in the lead-up to our third anniversary.

( * Branching out from exclusive appearances in artpacks, the original Mistigris World Tour also saw us sharing tracker music in (uncoded) music disks with [Radiance], Fire's music division, and our own local colleagues in [SONiC EQUiNOX].)

A couple of years later, in 1999, after we had fallen into the torpor in which we would remain for sixteen years, as a joke Cthulu released some deliberately terrible ANSI art with madASScow's provocative [The Project] (PRJCT006.ZIP) and officially dubbed it a very belated part of the Mistigris World Tour.

A couple of years later, RaDMaN, while grooming the ACiD Artpacks Archive for adaptation into the Dark Domain DVD, discovered that a crew calling itself "Mistic" had ripped MIST0696 wholesale with all our names and serial numbers filed off sometime in the spring of 1997, while our World Tour had been underway. For laughs, because the timing fit, we retroactively dubbed their release yet another Mistigris World Tour pack... really it's kind of flattering that someone enjoyed our work enough to plagiarise it so baldly! It's a statement that: this is worth stealing. (I believe that RaDMaN removed MISTIC1 from the archive as a scurrilous fake artpack, so our copy may be the only one in existence.)

Cthulu is on the record as stating that if the Mistigris revival were to wind up, he'd want to echo our illustrious history and do it with another World Tour, culminating in a joint release with Blocktronics. (Since 67's indefinite hiatus began, however, I guess we have no choice but to release artpacks forever!)