Arcade Game Typography, a review

The book is Arcade Game Typography by Toshi Omagari.

It's essentially a specimen book for a specialised genre: Arcade Game fonts.

If you're even a little bit into arcade games you have to get this book. It is unique and probably the first really serious attempt to investigate Arcade Game Typography.

As first mover Toshi has a lot of groundwork to lay: genres to define, histories to write, theories and rules to write. The rules of this work are: 8×8 pixels, monospace, featured in a published arcade game.

Typically each specimen has a short descriptive paragraph, pointing out unusual features, historical relevance, or linking to other works. Some specimens have a full page video game screenshot.

But it's not just specimens, special layouts, essays, and full- and double-page spreads add context, offer questions and research, and show a little of what lies beyond. They serve well to break up what could otherwise be a monotone work.

The book is beautifully designed and well printed except for the occasional colour mistake. A marked feature of video games typography is colour, which quickly becomes routine, with several colours being used in one font. Sometimes the colours chosen for printing make it difficult to see the difference between a coloured pixel in the font and the background (which would be masked out in a video game), and sometimes two font palette colours are so close when printed that they are very difficult to tell apart.

There is even the discovery of a genre unique to video games. The Letraset favourite Data 70 is an amusing graphical oddity in most of typography, but here in the world of video games, the graphical style is used so much that it has been elevated to a genre: MICR, short for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition.

As the closing essay notes the specialised field of hand-drawn 8×8 fonts soon got eclipsed when video game hardware systems were able to use the same vector-based fonts and font engines that office and home computer systems use. That makes the designs of this period a brief flare. I agree with the author, there is much to be gained by typographical study of the fonts produced by often typographically naive designers and programmers in a constrained, but colourful and dynamic, graphic system.