Shinobi Extended

SEGA’s 1987 ninja-themed horizontal-scrolling arcade game Shinobi is quite the classic with its sharp visuals and responsive play.

It also sports a gorgeous brush-style font in both a 16x16 format and an 8x8. Alas, the both fonts are limited to upper-case letters and numbers which gives them limited appeal outside of the game.

Not one to let pixels rot I reproduced the capitals based on the photographs from Toshi Omagari’s Arcade Game Typography book but noticed from a screenshot that the book was missing the exclamation mark. One ROM download and a BinXELView later I had symbols for speech marks, a shuriken-style asterisk and a dash as well.

Now all that was needed to do was to create a set of lower-case letters and additional symbols to match the style of the original glyphs. I hope you think I’ve done a good job, I think the result is a beautiful font that is quite readable for a variety of scenarios.