Turns out that BUTTS LOL looks super classy in the Captain Sky Hawk font

May 28, 2014 10:18 AM

The President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to render text in a variety of sweet-as-hell video game typefaces using Arcade Font Writer?

Based on NFG's Arcade Font Engine, of which: a big list of bitmap fonts all on one page, and a DIY font-ripping guide if you're into that sort of thing.

posted by cortex (18 comments total)

I wonder how many people type

WELCOME
THRILLHO

into the interface and just scroll through the available options.

(Hint: It's not zero.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:25 AM on May 28, 2014 [4 favorites]

This is going to make a lot of my friends hate me.
posted by COBRA! at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2014

MCMike: The correct font for WELCOME THRILLHO appears to be Flak Attack
posted by theodolite at 10:32 AM on May 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately Bad Dudes does not appear in the list, so we'll never be able to properly express our intention to rescue the president from Dragon Ninja with extreme prejudice.

(still neat though)
posted by namewithoutwords at 10:35 AM on May 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Cool - would love to see some of the Williams games represented. Defender (modified/shared by Stargate and Bubbles), Robotron, Joust (shared with Inferno), and Sinistar all had very distinctive fonts.
posted by plinth at 10:39 AM on May 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Speaking of ninjas, wow, that Shinobi font. With no warning, I found myself dropping straight into a Proustian reverie of bitmapped chop-suey Chinoiserie and little pixelated shuriken.
posted by RogerB at 10:44 AM on May 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

Huh, a lot of these don't have an apostrophe. It is commonly replaced by a <3.
posted by maryr at 10:48 AM on May 28, 2014

Atascii!!

Speaking of something Proustian, this almost forgotten (by me) typeface suddenly launched severe nostalgia for those Saturday afternoons spent protecting humanity from the Zylons.
posted by honestcoyote at 10:51 AM on May 28, 2014

So for reasons of entirely free association, I typed in "seriously guys?" and started scrolling through fonts from the top. Well, I guess Dragon Saber didn't have a question mark in it's character set because:

SERIOUSLY GUYS.
posted by 256 at 10:55 AM on May 28, 2014

There's a local barcade with a Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninjas machine, and I find it incredibly satistfying to play it and have my Bad Dude gender validated. I still suck at jumping between train cars, though.
posted by Juliet Banana at 11:06 AM on May 28, 2014

There's one toward the beginning of the alphabet, I forget which font, that when you scroll through the "styles" suddenly becomes Japanese.
posted by maryr at 11:06 AM on May 28, 2014

Ah, it's absent from the Arcade Font Writer but this immediately put me in mind of a Neo Geo game called The Super Spy. The text was a perfect match for the amusingly terrible dialog, usually from the captive scientists you'd find locked in various closets throughout the building.
posted by usonian at 12:34 PM on May 28, 2014

plinth, Robotron is in the list. I personally would like to see more Atari fonts than just KLAX. There's no sign of the large-size serif font they used in many late-80s games, for example.
posted by JHarris at 1:04 PM on May 28, 2014

jharris - it is and it's not (I had actually missed it). They picked the non-descript 7x3 font used for high scores and annotations, not the distinctive one.

Trivia - the text in Robotron is ASCII except that it includes a set of embedded markup control codes for setting font, color, position, etc.
posted by plinth at 1:31 PM on May 28, 2014

Came for the fonts, left due to lack of 8-bit start-screen music.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:55 PM on May 28, 2014

Short, shameful secret: I have never stopped being amused by 'ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US'.
posted by straight at 4:46 PM on May 28, 2014 [4 favorites]

straight: Neither has anyone else. We just agreed to pretend.

Actually, one of the strangest experiences of my life was working in an office with a bunch of slightly older folks in the social service sector and making an ironic ALL YOUR BASE reference only to have none of my five coworkers get it. In 2007. So, I called everyone over to my desk and played them the video, which they of course loved and then rushed to their email to send the link to all their friends.
posted by 256 at 4:59 PM on May 28, 2014 [4 favorites]

I dropped a Gordon Gartrel reference at work yesterday and was oh so delighted that Deb in the kitchen caught it. :) What followed was a brief discussion of Cosby Show lore.
posted by blueberry at 7:05 AM on May 29, 2014