Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type

The tone of this wonderfully nerdy book is perfectly balanced. On one hand, there is some seriously detailed study by a true typographic expert. On the other, there is the garish wonder of the games and designs on show. The author clearly enjoys the cheap thrill of the arcade heyday and allows this passion to filter through his prose even when discussing a misplaced pixel or half-hearted bit of anti-aliasing. It’s a fun read, dense with enlightening details.Large parts of the book have you playing spot the difference between reproductions of the entire glyph set encoded onto games from different manufacturers that have strikingly similar fonts. So when we discover that Space Harrier has a cap V misaligned (by one whole pixel!) it feels like a momentus event It had me reaching for MAME to see it in RGB. I’m now about a quarter of the way through and anticipating many more such moments of minor astonishment.In case it matters to you, the focus is tightly on arcade games, not home ports or dedicated console games. It defines it ground clearly though, and will make you appreciate the limitations of an 8x8 pixel grid, and the fun that designers had in trying to bend it to their needs.

I'm a real fan of books telling the history behind gaming, and this one really stands out to me. It may be a very niche subject - the typography of the arcade game, and more specifically fonts created using an 8x8 pixel grid - but there is so much fascinating detail. Screenshots from the games and beautifully laid out font samples are only part of the book. There are intriguing facts, details about the games/series and even a revelation about the earliest arcade font (what we now call the Atari or Namco/Pac-Man font) that became so prevalent in Japanese games. So if you appreciates games and fonts, this is the book for you!

Fantastic book full of exciting info, but marred by the odd design decision to present most of the colourful specimens on a light grey background - as well as being visually uncomfortable it robs the fonts of their charm and impact.

Great book, loads of 8x8 fonts, loads of games screenshots, loads of colour. No mention of any 8-bit computers of the era though, this is arcade only.

Inspired me to create my own bitmap typeface :)