Advent of Fonts 2024
- 📅
- 📝 701 words
- 🕙 4 minutes
December 2024 sees the fourth year of my Advent of Fonts project where I published a 24-day advent calendar of 8x8 pixel on Mastodon.
Many will be original designs or significantly-extended (normally at least adding a lower-case) and make it into my ZX Origins the straight ports and conversions are listed here as they are not part of that collection.
Those ports needed a home, so as usual they are presented here.
- ZX Amelia
- Indiana Jones Atlantis
- Scarlet
- Leander
- IBM 3270
- Radial
- Hydra
- Wand
- Bomb Jack ZX
- Patrol
- Yie Ar Kung Fu 128K
- Brashi
- Delphine
- Doublewear
- Colonization
Day 2 — Indiana Jones Atlantis
Lucas Arts point ‘n click adventures started on the Commodore 64 and Monkey Island took the C64 font with a slight mod to the x-height on ascenders.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis polished that further and introduced a non-bold weight and a tiny map font which I’ve fleshed out here to include lower-case and symbols.
Download Indiana Jones Atlantis fonts.
Day 4 — Leander
The side-scroller Leander from Psygnosis bears more than a resemblance to their Shadow of the Beast and while the in-game fonts are okay it’s the title font that really stands out with it’s stylish curves and serif-induced strokes.
Here’s a conversion of the title font with some extra glyphs to round it off.
Day 5 — IBM 3270
IBM’s 1971 terminal set the stage for “green screen” interfaces for a few decades even long after the addition of a few more colours.
The terminal font is surprisingly stylised for a business machine and it’s reproduced here as best as it can in an 8x8 pixel font with bold variant.
Day 7 — Hydra
You might recognize Colin Brignall’s 1968 font Revue from Yu Suzuki’s 16-bit 1987 classic After Burner where it was used for the title screen and arcade livery.
Curiously the in-game font is an adaptation of Stop but Atari came through a few years later with a great adaptation of Revue in their 1990 coin-op Hydra.
Day 9 — Bomb Jack ZX
Tehkan’s 1984 arcade platformer Bomb Jack was a banger — instantly easy to get into and fun gameplay that was tricky to master.
While the arcade sported the now-famous Atari arcade font Elite System’s 1986 Sinclair Spectrum conversion by Paul Holmes, Andy Williams and Karen Trueman went with a completely custom and rustic font of their own. The upper case letters were later used on Elite’s Scooby-Doo game on both the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum.
Day 11 — Yie Ar Kung-Fu 128K
Home ports often neglect the arcade font of the original and the initial ZX Spectrum port of Yie Ar Kung Fu was no exception using the boring Speccy ROM font.
The 128K promoting Stars on the 128 bundle included an 128K only version by Brian Beuken that featured this beautiful and unique brush-stroke full-height font. I created symbols & small-caps lower case in the style.
Day 13 — Delphine
French software house Delphine produced some fine games in their time from point ‘n click classics to rotoscoped cutting-edge platformers.
This bumper pack contains 4 fonts. A neat wide sans from Future Wars/Operation Stealth, the quirky UI font from Another World, a high-contrast art-deco from Flashback, and a striking bold font from the Genesis version of Shaq Fu!
Day 15 — Colonization
Sid Meier is a legend in the empire-building sim games world. From Pirates! in 1987 to Civ 6 in 2016 you’d be hard pressed to find anyone else with more great sims under their belt let alone their name in the title.
This pack reproduces three complimentary fonts — a serif, a sans and a mini, all from the 1995 classic Sid Meier’s Colonization.
