Description: The personal blog of Ian Voyce.
This book sits firmly at the intersection of gaming nerdiness and typographical geekery. It’s a deep-dive into the heavily constrained but creative world of the typefaces of 70s, 80s, and 90s arcade games.
Toshi Omagari’s book is a combination of glossy coffee table experience and reference manual, with both full-colour screenshots and the fonts themselves, laid out in their raw 8×8 gridded glory.
There are plenty of screenshots of the fonts being used in-situ in classic games, as well as more esoteric ones like Yu Suzuki’s lesser known work Dynamite Dux. There are also some interesting historic tidbits about the development of the fonts – including the lineage; how fonts were “borrowed” and adapted by various arcade machine manufacturers rather than being created from scratch.