DCDragonfire: A Free, Retro, Video Game Font

DCDragonfire, is named after the vintage video game company Imagic 's game of the same name, Dragonfire . "Imagic was an American video game developer and publisher that created games initially for the Atari 2600. Founded in 1981 by corporate alumni of Atari, Inc., and Mattel, its best-selling titles were Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, and Demon Attack. Imagic also released games for Intellivision, ColecoVision, Atari 8-bit family, TI-99/4A, IBM PCjr, VIC-20, Commodore 64, TRS-80 Color Computer, and Magnavox Odyssey2. The company never recovered from the video game crash of 1983 and was liquidated in 1986." - Wikipedia

DCDragonfire was created specifically for use with our work on the Activision Anthology . Each letter was vectorized from high-resolution scans of all the Imagic game packaging using Adobe Illustrator.

You may notice that on occasion Imagic was prone to certain letter variations such as the case with "R" and "N". We have included these variations, housing them within the upper and lowercase characters. In addition, we added extras such as the vertical "NEW", the merged characters in "THE", and a few Imagic character icons for fun. There was also a brief attempt to extend the character set but due to the fact that these additional characters were not required, the project was put on permanent hold.

All available Imagic game labels and box art from the Atari 2600 era were painstakingly recreated as scalable vector artwork through Illustrator. The artwork was then used within the Activision Anthology Series. More specifically, the Imagic artwork itself was used in conjunction with the Playstation Portable variation where the game is better known as Activision Hits: Remixed . The Imagic game selection is not available with all Activision Anthology games on all systems.

The Activision Anthology is a compilation of the games developed by Activision for use on the Atari 2600 during the 1980's. In addition, games by Absolute Entertainment, Imagic, and several homebrews by independent developers are included in some versions. The homebrew games are singled out for the Gameboy Advance and include Climber 5 by XYPE , Okie Dokie by Bob Colbert, Oystron by XYPE , Skeleton+ by Eric Ball, Space Treat Deluxe by Fabrizio Zavagli, Vault Assault by Brian Prescott, and Euchre by Erik Eid. We are proud to say that we have worked with all of these homebrew developers on these and other past projects.

 

Windows TrueType Update

Thanks go out to Michael for noting that the previous download was incompatible with Windows. We have updated the font to TrueType for Mac and PC. If you have been having trouble with the font or noticed an odd issue with the uppercase "A" please download the file again. Thanks.

 

Font Update

It has recently come to light that the original font creator Martin Wait had his font "Company" digitized in 2012. (Yeah, we're a bit late on this). The font was developed in 1978 for Letraset and you can now purchase it directly from MyFonts for a great deal at only $26.00 (we see the connection). The font is missing the alternate, rounded 'E' but does have the original 'Y' and 'Z' as we had no reference and needed to make this up on our own.

"Martin Wait (1942–2012) was a British font designer and graphic designer. He was best known for his work for Letraset, which created dry transfer lettering used on advertising and other lettering projects.

Wait was born in Forest Gate in London and attended Lister Community School in Plaistow. Despite having dyslexia, he created custom lettering for advertising, including logos for Tetley's, the Radio Times, Fox's Glacier Mints and Alpen cereal. He later came to design fonts for Letraset and Monotype, often in the script typeface genre." - Wikipedia

We also found this amazing 'South Bay Plaza' sign showing 'Company' in use. South Bay Plaza shopping center opened in 1954 and is located in National City, California. 

 

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Dale Crum
Dale Crum
Owner / Creative Director at Doc4 Design

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