Press Start 2P

Press Start 2P is a pixel font modelled on the letterforms burned into 1980s arcade hardware — specifically the bitmap type used on Namco cabinets. CodeMan38 drew every glyph on an eight-by-eight grid, and the name comes from the prompt those machines showed when a second player could join.

Because it is genuinely grid-based, it only looks right at multiples of its native size: 8px, 16px, 24px, 32px. At anything in between the renderer interpolates and you get soft, slightly wrong pixels that defeat the point. Set it at a multiple and disable font smoothing if your context allows.

It is extremely wide — each character occupies a full grid cell — so a short phrase consumes a lot of line. Use it for game titles, retro UI, itch.io pages and score displays, never for running text.