Saints Row 2 x PLNY Textylia 2008 Promo Tee: The Rarest Saints Row Shirt Nobody Talks About
Some pieces of merch are rare because they sold out fast. Others are rare because almost nobody ever knew they existed. The Saints Row 2 x PLNY Textylia 2009 White Promo Tee belongs to the second group.
It’s a numbered, Poland-exclusive promotional shirt, released alongside the Polish launch of Saints Row 2 and made in collaboration with one of the country’s best-known streetwear brands. Search for it online and you’ll find almost nothing: no resale history, no sold listings, no collector threads. As far as we can tell, there isn’t another one for sale anywhere right now.
To understand how this shirt came to exist, you need three stories: the game, the brand and the rapper who connected them.
The Game: A Short History of Saints Row 2
Saints Row 2 is an action-adventure game developed by Volition and published by THQ. It’s the sequel to 2006’s Saints Row, and it launched in October 2008 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version followed in January 2009, and a Linux release arrived in 2016.
The story picks up right after the first game. Your custom character wakes from a five-year coma to find that the 3rd Street Saints have been disbanded and that their territory in Stilwater has been taken over by three new criminal syndicates and a corrupt corporation. With the help of old and new allies, you rebuild the gang and take the city back.
Gameplay-wise, it’s an open-world game played from a third-person perspective. You roam Stilwater on foot or by vehicle, fight with a wide range of firearms and new MMA-style melee moves, and call in gang members to back you up. A huge part of the appeal was customization: your character, your cars, your crew and even your gang’s symbol. It also included a two-player online co-op mode, so you could explore the city together.
Saints Row 2 is also where the series chose its identity. The original game was compared to Grand Theft Auto by most reviewers, so Volition leaned into a more comedic, over-the-top tone to stand out. That decision shaped everything that followed. Reviews were largely favorable, praising the action and the straightforward fun, while criticizing technical issues and a lack of innovation. The Windows port in particular was heavily criticized for problems that the console versions didn’t have.
Sales started slowly, at around 400,000 units by November 2008, but the game kept finding players. By September 2010 it had reached 3.4 million units, and Saints Row: The Third followed in November 2011.
The Brand: What Is PLNY Textylia?
PLNY Textylia is one of Poland’s best-known streetwear and hip-hop clothing brands. It was founded in 1997 by Tede (Jacek Graniecki), one of the country’s most recognizable rappers.
The style is built on American street culture: loose fits, hoodies, tees, tracksuits and caps inspired by basketball, skateboarding and college-style references from places like Brooklyn and Harlem. Over the years the brand split into a men’s line, PLNY Textylia, and a popular women’s line, PLNY LALA.
What makes PLNY important is timing. It appeared in the late 1990s, when Polish hip-hop was still building its own visual identity. For a lot of fans, wearing PLNY meant belonging to the scene, in the same way that wearing a certain American label meant belonging to the culture abroad. And the person behind it was one of the biggest names in Polish rap.
The Connection: How Tede Ended Up in Saints Row 2
This is where the story gets interesting. In Poland, Saints Row 2 was published by CD Projekt, and for the promotion they didn’t go with a standard marketing campaign. They chose Tede as the face of the Polish release. He was already the founder of PLNY and a major name in Polish rap, so the pairing of a gangster-comedy game and a hip-hop figure with his own clothing brand made a lot of sense.
The Polish edition leaned into this heavily. Instead of the usual collector’s extras, buyers of the Polish special edition got an exclusive bonus disc built around Tede, featuring wallpapers with the rapper and a track written specifically for the game. The strategy guide was reportedly written by Maciej Makuła, known online as “Wonziu,” and the story goes that the author got so fed up with the job that he filled well over 150 pages with fake “Uncle Teddy” life advice instead of real game tips. On the disc, Tede essentially stands in for Uncle Gary, the in-game character played by Gary Busey in the original release.
The track was called “Bang Bang [Rzeźnik z Esende].” Tede wrote it for the promotion, and it was produced by Matheo, a well-known producer from the Wielkie Joł label. Fans could listen to it and download it from the official Polish game website, which launched the day before the PC release. That site also promised wallpapers, gameplay videos and competitions, with the main prize being limited shirts made by PLNY specifically for the premiere.
Pre-orders in Poland opened at 79.90 zł for the standard edition and 149.90 zł for the special edition, which added an artbook and a gold, gangster-style pendrive. The PC version launched on January 30, 2009, at 99.90 zł.
It was a campaign that blended gaming, hip-hop and streetwear in a way very few game launches have ever done, and the tee was a part of it.
The Shirt: A Numbered Run Almost Nobody Remembers
According to an archived store page, the shirt was released in an exclusive run of 150 numbered pieces. It sold for 109 PLN, in white, and the number on your shirt was assigned randomly, because buyers couldn’t choose it.
The design is simple and very much of its time:
- 100% cotton
- the black and white Saints Row 2 logo printed on the front over yellow tribal-style graphics, with a smaller PLNY Textylia logo below
- a leather-style patch sewn at the bottom front, showing both brand logos and the shirt’s unique number
- a large yellow dot/square-style graphic of the game’s cover character printed on the back
The patch is the key detail. It’s what turns a promo shirt into a numbered collectible, and it’s the first thing to look for on any example that surfaces.
The shirt we have is #00059, in size Large (81 x 60 cm). It’s used, with general wear and a few dirty spots, which is normal for a shirt that’s now almost 18 years old.
Why This Tee Is So Hard to Find
There are a few reasons you won’t see this shirt anywhere.
It was a promo item. It was made for a specific launch, and some copies were distributed through contests rather than normal retail.
It was regional. It was a Polish release, tied to Polish promotion, a Polish publisher and a Polish rapper. Most international collectors have never heard of it.
The run was small. Even at 150 pieces, once you account for wear, loss and the fact that most people wore their shirts, very few have survived in collectible condition.
It sits between two scenes. Gaming merch collectors don’t always follow Polish streetwear, and Polish hip-hop collectors don’t always follow video game promos. Items like this fall into the gap, which is why there’s no price history to lean on.
That last point is what makes pricing it so hard. In our usual price-check process, we’d start with sold listings on Grailed or eBay. For this shirt, there aren’t any. No sales, no active listings and no direct comparison.
A Piece of Both Cultures
This tee is more than merch. It’s a record of a short moment in 2008-2009 when a Western open-world game, a Polish publisher, a rapper and a streetwear brand all ended up in the same campaign.
It connects Saints Row 2, one of the most memorable entries in the series, with Tede and PLNY Textylia, two names that shaped Polish hip-hop and street fashion. And the story behind it, from the bonus disc to the fake life advice in the strategy guide, is just as strange and fun as the game itself.
It’s also one of the clearest examples of why archive collecting is about more than brands and logos. Sometimes the rarest items aren’t the ones everyone is chasing. They’re the ones nobody has documented yet.
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