Guardian

Guardian is a solid-state electronic pinball design created by Williams Electronics designer Barry Oursler, but it was never put into production. No commercial units were built; only a small number of playfields were made, some of which Oursler kept in his personal files after leaving the company.

Because the game never reached the assembly line, no rules sheets, artwork, or gameplay details have survived beyond its existence as a design (model number 524) in Williams' internal records. When asked about it decades later, in 2020, Oursler said he could not recall specifics about the game, noting that he had drawn up many games during his career that never got made.

Guardian is best understood today as one of the many unproduced prototype concepts from Williams' solid-state era, a reminder that not every design that reached the drawing board made it to arcades and homes.