NES Controller

This Is my last shirt from Moke. Thanks for all the memories!

He originally got it from a website that was having a sale. It came in the same order as the CCCP shirt. He gave them to me because they were too big for him and he figured I'd take it anyway. Which was entirely true. It doesn't hurt that it was free and brand new -unworn AFAIK-.
I don't have a ton of grey shirts but I seem to enjoy all the ones I have. Maybe the designer who chooses to put his design on grey has something awesome in mind. For the longest time middle grey wasn't a super common color, it's difficult to ink jet or 4 color print on and if you're going to screen it you can get black shirts cheaper. The retro game reference is sweet and is way cooler than the other "Know Your Roots" shirt that I already have. Moke passed it off to me once he realized that the store's "large" size shirts were much larger than expected. I don't care, I'm not trying to impress anyone, do you see in the pic how far down it goes though? Since it rained today I wore my sweatshirt which looked slick with the length and contrasting black.
There isn't too much to this shirt, the design is a lot of smoke and mirrors. No words on the front or back or anything, I even had to make up a title for the post today instead of just using the text like I'm used to. Hopefully you recognize this as a controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System -the original Nintendo home console-. People from my generation -mid 80s- grew up with these and have nostalgia goggles for anything 8-bit. Because the controller was so iconic it gets a lot of play in throwback designs and merchandise. The graphic is a high contrast controller with some paint splotches to hide the hard edges and to make the shape more organic/street/underground -and ironically more "edgy"-. They even took it to the next step by utilizing a halftone pattern for some shading. The frosting on the cake, as it were, was that they printed it at the bottom of the shirt. This is a more expensive and labor intensive process that sets the design apart from the rest.
I like to wear shirts like this to keep my nerd/geek image up. Just every once and a while put on a shirt with a D20 or some line of code, a periodic element or a controller in this case so that people know what persona you're shooting for. I would be surprised if someone didn't get this. Like, if you were just glancing over you may just think it's a spray paint design but that's okay since you'll just think I'm "hip" or wherever. Seeing this doesn't warrant a callout or something, it's an expected image.

The NES controller has been around for my whole life. The system was launched around the year I was born and I have had one hooked up to my TV all the way up until a few years ago. One birthday, back in Northern California, I had a Nintendo themed party, complete with red, grey and black balloons -like the controllers- and a Mario shaped cake! To this day I'll still pick up an NES game and play it for a while if I'm looking for a quick distraction. I can't bring myself to devote as much time and crank out the impossibly difficult titles, but Kirby's Adventure can make an average day awesome.