Fonts and typefaces are important for product branding and recognition even if most people will never recognize them or their names. Typeface choices are often are inextricable from logos. Games have all the same uses for typefaces: to communicate information to the player, to contribute to the overall graphical design of the game, and to contribute to branding.
I am not a graphic designer. I’m a baby typography nerd and this thread is inspired by two things. The first is the book “Arcade Game Typography” by Toshi Omagari. It's delightful and you should go check it out from your library. I learned a bunch about fixed-width fonts in general, the specifics of the constraints that arcade games imposed, and even learned new things about classic arcade games in general. The book is full of Insert Credit anecdotes where they discuss the typefaces and also make some comments about some extremely esoteric games.
The other inspiration for this thread is this upcoming new change to the Microsoft productivity suite.
Every time I see the font named “Aptos” I think of the planet Atropos from Returnal, one of my favorite games the last few years. That’s unrelated, but it’s a glitch specific to my own brain that you should all know.
As I said, I really can’t identify too many fonts in isolation (except for maybe Papyrus (ha)), but I certainly yelled into my headset how Heroes of the Storm uses “Neo Sans” most conspicuously for the final queue countdown. My friends yelled back at me to be quieter and stop being a dork. I recognize it because my company used it for quite a while in all their external marketing communications. It's an OK font. I kind of like some of the roundness of it, but it may be just because I had been exposed to it daily for the better part of a decade.
For arcade games, I really dig fonts that have a colored stripe in them. It‘s something that you don’t usually see in the wild, but the medium of an arcade game is more accepting of colored text.
I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss how Roguelikes all have a big dependency on fixed-width typography for their look at feel, but I’d be lying if I said I have put much time into anything text-mode since Castle on DOS. I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with the Webtiles interface.
The final “work” font I reach for is Source Code Pro. I do just enough programming that it‘s helpful to have a super-legible “programming” font and even though I’m sure there are some great terminal fonts included in default desktop OSes these days, I get to feel like a hipster by having Source Code Pro on all my computers.
For fun, everyone should go check out this amazing resource:
https://caveras.net/
I discovered this site looking for technical information about the Nintendo DS font and instead, I found a website full of well-designed (to my eyes) fun fonts, including a DS-inspired one and including an SMT-inspired one.
Please post your favorite use of typography or fonts in or around games (or not). Bonus points will be awarded if you somehow set your post in your favorite font.
