Font - Zub

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Mon, 13 Jul 2009
Subject: Zub

Another old bitmap font today, from our 8-bit days. This is from Zub, the Mastertronic game on Spectrum and Amstrad from 1986.

John was trying to do something different again on his next game (after Glider Rider), so we went from a massive font, to the smallest one possible, to try to simulate what we imagined 'proper' computers with 'multi-tasking windows' looked like (we'd never seen one in action). There's not really much you can do with a font 4 pixels wide (one of which is left blank as a space between characters), but it's still a challenge to get distinguishable M / N / Ws.

Towards the end of development we got the chance to do a 128K version of the game (the original is 48k), so suddenly, instead of desperately trying to squeeze the game into the tiny memory space allowed we suddenly had loads of kilobytes to fill, so I got to draw a large (but slightly wonky) serif font just for the intro.

Tags: font, pixel art, 8-bit, zx spectrum, amstrad cpc

Follow up post: Feud font

Predecessor post: Font - Glider Rider

View the softography page for Zub »

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