7/28/2023 0 Comments Zaccaria pinball first power upThe beauty of these fonts comes from the fact that they are not substitutable. You may define the whole set of characters as a videogame fontin the broad traditional sense. All the objects, backgrounds, letters and figures are just different graphic patterns in the same system.To callthem ‘characters’is to construct the world of the game as typography. Videogames are bitmap-based, so consist of elemental tile patterns of pixels. Videogame fonts are not autonomous components like the typefaces used for printing or displaying. The design is not outline-based, but a composition of coloured pixels from which the illusion of letters arises. The designers of those fonts made use of the platform’s limited resolution and colours inamazing ways.You might be surprised to know that each character of those ingenious fontdesigns was designed in 8x8 pixels,or 7x7 takingaccount of the single pixel space between characters. Some companies developed fonts specific to individual game series, such as the thin square sans featured in the influential shoot'em up Gradius (Konami, 1983). Sega used a kind of house font for games such as Space Harrier (see page 30) and Fantasy Zone (see page 56) to express their poppy, new-wave tone. Xevious (see page 48) was epoch-making for its symbolic use of a bespoke sci-fi font to suit the worldview of the game. A new wave of the typeface would emerge following the rise of the Japanese videogame industryin the mid 80s. The Atari font became a generic norm in the 80s videogame industry and evolved into many new variants, with modifications and stylizations. The same font was used for most of Atari’s games thereafter,and spread all over the world by other videogame developers, such as Namco, which ‘adopted’it for its own titles. It was most likely designed by Lyle Rains for Quiz Show (see pages 18 and 44-45) - one of the first Atari videogames to use a microprocessor instead of discrete logic. Driven by play and imagination, videogame typefaces evolved 1 ina unique profusion during the golden age of arcade games, which lasted from the mid 70s to the early 90s.They were primarily designed for displaying high scores and messages, and the most famous is the Atari font. Beyond technological typefaces, there were other genres of bitmap typefaces that were full of diversity, particularly in the world of videogames. Designed toworkatlow resolutionand with limited machine power, such bitmap typefaces may look identical, but they were functional for their own specific purposes - achieving a kind of technological beauty thatis still apparent today. But under the contemporary information surface you can still find legacies of the bitmap typefaces that were unique to 8- or 16-bit computers before the dominance of Microsoft and Apple. Today's highly developed computers anddisplay devices let you use the very same typefaces on screen as for printing. Should be able to play away after that.Thames
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