There Never Was An “NES Font,” Your Memories Are A Lie.

You’re Already Preparing To Fight Me About This.

You’re Still Wrong.

“This can’t be true!” you are probably thinking to yourself. “There was a standard font that all the classic NES games had! It was the same font across dozens of games! I vividly remember this!” And you are probably picturing the font from Super Mario Bros, which looks like this:

“There it is!” you might be saying. All the games had it! Legend Of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man —

not so fast, this is the Mega Man font:

All the letters are squared off and all of the numbers are wildly different. “Well that’s Capcom!” you might say, “maybe it’s a proprietary thing but there was a definite classic Nintendo font, used in a ton of NES games, at the very least in all the ‘Black Box’ classic games.”

Not quite. Here’s the font for Donkey Kong, the first game released for the Famicom, first “Black Box” game, predecessor of Mario Bros both regular and Super:

Check out the number 8, which was actually similar between Super Mario Bros and Mega Man. Check out the exclamation point. And here’s the font for Gumshoe, another “Black Box” title, a United States and Europe exclusive that never hit Japan.