8-Bit ABCs
I started this project in 2012. It seemed so simple an idea–so easy to execute. I was very wrong. I haven't been working on it non-stop for five years. There have been many fits and starts, long pauses and urgent rushes of activity. I'm very happy to get this project to a place that I'm happy with. I hope you all enjoy it too.
There are several pieces to this puzzle.
First, is the book itself, which is a free, as an ePub, PDF, Kindle or Apple iBook to download and share.
The second piece is the physical book which is available for sale. If you are interested go to LINK and get on the list for a copy now. I'm only making these for the hardcore fans. It's going to be a super-limited, one-time only production run. I'm hoping to add some nice details but the specs so far are: perfect bound, full-color, 40-pages on nice uncoated paper.
Lastly, the font '8X Condensed' is available for free under the Creative Commons license for non-commercial use.
At first, I pitched this idea to a few publishers. They liked the concept but they balked at the licensing issues that surround this project. This was years before Wreck-It Ralph, so I was in no-mans land. I worked for a long while towards bringing this to life as a Kickstarter project–but after a lot of thought I pulled the plug on that I refocused my efforts on the art for the book. I decided that it was more important to finish the project that I started then to try and profit from it. I didn't start it for money and I had a lot of fun creating every page from scratch, pixel by pixel with a lot of reverence to the original source materials.
Intro from the book...
This is the ABCs for the child of the children raised on Atari and Nintendo. The kid who grew up at the arcade, putting quarters in machines to play games hour after hour now has to teach his little one how to read. Anyone who just loves old games and the beautiful simplicity that they represent might also love this. I was one of those arcade kids. When I started studying design, I found a new appreciation for how simple shapes can become icons for a character or monster. This book has been a few years in the making. I am very happy to finally share it with the world. I hope it allows those of us from one era to share our joy with these games with the next generation. - John Freeborn
When I started this project eBooks (and the ePub format) were technically very limited. You couldn't use custom fonts or do much styling at all with the text. Thankfully, they have evolved and I was able to use my own font in the book. At first, I was going to use a font based on the 640x480 TV pixel from Atari games that I created called Activision (download). That font was too wide and wasn't working well so I created a new font, "8X Condensed Bold" specifically for this project. It's a tight monospaced set with some width flexibility that the original game fonts wouldn't have allowed. This adjustment makes the typeface more legible.
Legal Disclaimer...
All copyrights and trademarks of the character images used belong to their respective owners. These characters are not being sold. This book is not a licensed product and I do not claim ownership over the characters used in this book. There are too many to name them all, but without their creators and the inspiration that they generated this book would not exist.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
