Oxide Design Co.

Oxide t-shirts: The Black Knight

This shirt pays homage to one of the greatest pinball machines of all time: Black Knight, released in 1980 by Williams Electronics. The machine earned a reputation with a number of firsts:

• the first with Magna-Save
• the first to give players a bonus ball for high scores
• the first two-level playing field
• and… the first pinball machine I actually loved to play

I’ve spent my fair share of hours playing video games, but pinball had always been my dad’s game — something I assumed that people only played because real video games hadn’t been invented yet. That was, until 2006, when Oxide spent some of its office-improvement budget to repair its own Black Knight machine. (Drew had purchased Oxide’s machine several years earlier, spending hours on it himself until it finally short-circuited while he was about to break his personal high score.)

So it was, in 2006, that I finally discovered the wonders of pinball. Black Knight was a revelation, and I was spoiled to have one so close at hand. Unlike video games, a game of pinball is all strategy and skill. When you lose, you lose on your own accord; it’s just you versus your own limitations. In that way, a great game of pinball of just like solving a design problem.

Black Knight has another defining feature: it talks. Although it wasn’t the first pinball machine with recorded voice samples, the Black Knight’s are certainly the most bad-ass. Since our Black-Knight-immortalizing t-shirt doesn’t play sound, you’ll have to settle for this…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Since this is the last of our t-shirt posts, this is a good time to thank our favorite t-shirt printer: Johnson Bros., owned and operated by all-around cool dude and master printer Ken Justman.