Playdate Arcade Fonts

A collection of bitmap fonts for Playdate , the tiny handheld game system from Panic

• Where are these fonts taken from?

  All included fonts where hand-drawn from Toshi Omagari's magnificent book Arcade Game Typography as reference. It's a lovely hommage to the hey-day of arcade games and to me it's been one of my favourite videogame related books.

• Who are these fonts for?

  The fonts have created with Panic's Playdate in mind, a tiny handheld game system with a monochrome display. If you find these useful for other purposes, please go ahead and make use of them!

• When is a font tagged as incomplete?

  Fonts are tagged as incomplete, when they lack one or more characters in their supported character range. So when a font supports uppercase letters, but misses single ones, it's incomplete. Font are not tagged as incomplete, when they support the full range of uppercase characters, but have no lowercase characters.

• Why are some fonts incomplete?

  This question can only be answered by the original designers of these fonts. Drawing only the characters used by a game, saving diskspace, limited knowledge of Western typography. My guess is as good as your's. However, it seems to me that the maker of the book left out some characters on purpose, e.g. some spread page highlight the quality of a font at the cost of completeness.

• Why are some fonts missing?

  If you know the book these fonts were taken from, you might wonder why some fonts are missing entirely. That's mostly the case when a font makes use of multiple colours, be it for aesthetic reasons or to make the font more legible through anti-aliasing. Since this mostly doesn't work for the Playdate's monochrome display, most of these fonts were omitted while others were adapted.

• What's an unused font?

  A font considered for a game that didn't make it into the final product. Presumably, they ended in the ROM and have later been discovered by the author of the Arcade Game Typography book.

• How are these fonts licensed?

  All included fonts are part of the public domain and as such they are available under the terms of the CC0 license.

• Can I use these fonts for x?

  If you want to use these fonts into non-Playdate projects, you might be interested in Bits'N'Picas a tool that can open Playdate fonts and export them to a variety of formats.