JOSHUA

Posted May 26, 2011 at 19:22 in Games, Graphics, Illustrator, Typography - Say something

This is about a font that I made. Scroll down to the end of it for the moneyshot or read the boring backstory involving nuclear weapons, megalomaniacal behavior and messianic complex.

A while back I mentioned the innovative game developers Introversion Software and in 2006 they released a game called DEFCON which caught my eye with its striking visuals and strong allusions to the 80′s kult-classic movie WarGames.

DEFCON is sort of a modern-day version of the old Amiga classic Nuclear War (which, in turn, was based on Flying Buffalo‘s card-game designed by Douglas Malewicki), sans the comedy.

“Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the war room.”

Ok, I admit. It’s a poor comparison, they are not even close, but both games does allow you (and, in fact, encourage you) to nuke the hell out of your opponents. Anyhow, DEFCON seem to have some very dedicated fans and a thriving modding community and voices where raised in the games forum expressing a wish to change the games default typeface (which seems to be Kremlin from DaFont by Vic Fieger) to more resemble that from the WarGames movie. I was surprised that there were no one who had already made it so I thought that this would be a fun thing to try out. Maybe if I reproduced it and gave it away for free, they would look at me in awe and accept me as their one, true saviour…

Well, most likely not, but still as I said, a fun project so I took some screenshots of some letters from the movie and drew them in Illustrator. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get screenshots of the complete alphabet so some of them are my own interpretation of what I think they would look like. They’re all caps and I intend to make two versions, one monospaced and one kerned. I still don’t know the name of the original font and truth be told I haven’t made that much research in the matter, either. So, it seem fit to name the typeface after the movies main antagonist, the AI – Joshua.

“Would you like to play a game?”

I am fairly happy with the outcome, being my first attempt at making a font, and I guess the plan is to turn it all to a working typeface, but right now it just seem to be too much of tedious tweaking and manual fiddling about. Guess my lack of persistence and laziness outweighs my messianic complex…

Some rainy day, maybe.

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