I released Gameness on July 10, 2010. The idea came from the lettering on the Game Boy box art for Final Fantasy Legend, which reminded me of Binner Gothic, a typeface that was widely used in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I wanted to capture some of that condensed, Deco-inspired character without copying it, so I created a narrow display face with tall, streamlined letterforms.
One of the defining features was the unusually tall S, which gave the design a distinctive silhouette. That shape caused problems when two S characters appeared together and when accents had to fit above it, so I created alternate forms and programmed them to appear automatically where needed. I also included an alternate barred A. Gameness was originally released as a single all-caps style and remained unchanged for almost sixteen years.
I completed Gameness 2.000 on June 28, 2026. This was a complete revision that expanded the original Regular into a family of eight weights: Thin, Extra-Light, Light, Regular, Semi-Bold, Bold, Heavy, and Black, each with a matching italic. I drew a lowercase for the first time and refined the capitals to make them more consistent while preserving the tall, narrow character of the original design. The italics use a shallow 7.13-degree angle, which keeps their forms clean and helps them hold up well on screens.
I rebuilt the spacing and kerning, redesigned the accents, and expanded support for Latin-based languages. The period, comma, quotation marks, and guillemots were revised, while the old dotted zero was replaced with a form that works more consistently across the full weight range. Currency and mathematical symbols were updated, the fraction feature was improved, and some less useful symbols were removed. The vertical metrics were also adjusted to accommodate the larger character set.
The alternate barred A remains available, but I moved it from the old salt feature to stylistic set 1, where it is easier to access in current applications. The automatic nesting S pairs also remain, now joined by corresponding lowercase s pairs. Despite the scale of the reconstruction, the central idea is still the same: a slender Deco display face shaped by my memories of early Game Boy packaging and the typography of the late 1980s and early 1990s.