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Arcade Game Typography

215 points| Impossible | 6 years ago |readonlymemory.vg

47 comments

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[+] colanderman|6 years ago|reply
It's a shame these are all presented with giant blocky pixels. It makes some of the fonts look really ugly (ex. Lady Bug). Better IMO to present them as they would appear on the medium for which the designers intended them, a CRT. https://www.hottechzone.com/is-an-old-crt-television-perfect... has some good examples of the difference.

Another post from the same site, with a high-quality image of a Space Invaders CRT for direct comparison with the first example in the article: https://www.hottechzone.com/taito-space-invaders-arcade-mach...

[+] Rooster61|6 years ago|reply
I dunno, I think it's good to look at these typefaces from a different perspective. An analogy would be examining a butterfly that has been pinned so that its anatomy can be examined up close. It's not as pretty or elegant as seeing it fluttering around outside, but it does let you experience it in a way that gives you information you wouldn't normally get.
[+] mnem|6 years ago|reply
In case you’re looking for a cheaper copy (or that sells out) I think that’s just a hardback version of https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0500021740
[+] bartread|6 years ago|reply
Damn: I wish I'd seen that before. No comments on this when I ordered. Would also have dodged their annoying checkout process.
[+] pixelbath|6 years ago|reply
Already sold out; thanks for the link!
[+] ungzd|6 years ago|reply
On ZX Spectrum, games often had fonts based on MICR[1] or OCR-A[2]. Example: [3]. I still don't understand why. I see these fonts in the wild very, very rarely. Was they popular in UK in 80s maybe? Was they used even outside bank cheques?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A

[3] https://archive.org/serve/zx_Alien_8_1985_Ultimate_Play_The_...

[+] AndrewStephens|6 years ago|reply
That's an easy question to answer - because they looked cool and futuristic. If you watch old episodes of Doctor Who or 70s films you will often see props and displays with similar fonts, and video games followed that aesthetic.

I guess those fonts had just started to appear on cheques and machine readable tickets so people associated those typefaces with computers.

[+] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
Because in the 1970s, those fonts were visual code for "computer", and there was some spillover into the 1980s. Books with a computer theme, such as type-in program books and young adult novels, often had part or all of their title set in such a font. You see it also on electronic products of the era, such as the Waddingtons Game Machine.
[+] Razengan|6 years ago|reply
I love the MICR'ish fonts and still try to imitate them.
[+] ArtWomb|6 years ago|reply
Don't sunset bitmap fonts just yet (or many old school gamedev dark arts). They can be more portable and faster to render than vectors ;)
[+] matthewfcarlson|6 years ago|reply
The software I work on at work uses bitmap fonts. We actually have a system that renders windows fonts without subpixel rendering on a few backgrounds and then saves the output to header files for us to include in the project. It's mainly for space saving reasons and the fact that getting a proper text rendering system was more work than it was worth.
[+] tenebrisalietum|6 years ago|reply
So what's your favorite, HN?

Personally I'm a big fan of

- the Apple ][ font,

- what I call the "Nintendo Font" that was in many 8-bit NES games and arcade games. It's the font in Pac-man. I believe some Atari games from the 70's used it,

- The VT220 font - I use the GlassTTY font in PuTTY, I really like it.

[+] richrichardsson|6 years ago|reply
Used to love making bitmap fonts in DPaint on the Amiga, something quite meditative about it almost.
[+] jordn|6 years ago|reply
These are beautiful and very on-trend rn. Anyone have links to good webfont versions?
[+] CmdrKrool|6 years ago|reply
Not webfonts as such, but this site will generate you some images: https://nfggames.com/games/fontmaker/

(I feel the book must have been inspired by this site somehow, particularly when you read the various 'notes' that pop up after selecting a font from the dropdown.)

[+] atum47|6 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to pass all those fonts trough a neural network so a GAN try to generate some new ones
[+] gwern|6 years ago|reply
In a sense, any GAN which generates fonts, like https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1095603397179396098 or http://www.machinelearningfont.com/ or https://medium.com/@robert.munro/creating-new-scripts-with-s... , is already generating bitmap fonts, because the generator is upscaling through multiple resolutions. If you want the 'bitmap' version, you'd just grab the 32px layer output etc.

But the pixel art I've seen from GANs hasn't been too good. I think it's ultimately because it's very impoverished a representation and pixel art relies heavily on us already knowing what we might be looking at, and a GAN doesn't know that. Imagine trying to learn to generate Pokemon when there's only a few hundred examples of them and you've never seen any of the millions of plant or animal species they are based off of?

[+] phkahler|6 years ago|reply
Does it have the vector fonts?
[+] Jolter|6 years ago|reply
Looks like it's about pixel fonts specifically.
[+] hcs|6 years ago|reply
I also came here wondering about the Battlezone font.
[+] proc0|6 years ago|reply
Yeah was looking for the zip to check out some syntax in this font and then I realized it was an actual book.