Press Start 2P

Try Press Start 2P

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Press Start 2P Regular

About Press Start 2P

Press Start 2P is a display typeface whose letters are assembled from square pixels on a coarse grid, in the manner of arcade game screens. Every character in the specimen occupies the same width, and curves are rendered as steps. According to the official notes, the capitals and digits trace back to Atari's Sprint from 1977, while the specific glyph forms follow Namco's Return of Ishtar from 1986, an early game that used lowercase regularly. Unlike the original game font, this TrueType version adds many characters beyond ASCII so that European languages, Greek and Cyrillic among them, can be set; the total is 657 glyphs. Its pixels align at 8px, 16px and other multiples of 8. Cody Boisclair, credited as CodeMan38, made the font, which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Press Start 2P works

Retro game titles and menus

The glyphs follow 1980s arcade lettering, so a start screen or score table looks period-correct.

Pixel-art projects

Set at 8px or a multiple of it, each font pixel lands on the grid alongside sprite artwork.

Stream overlays and event posters

A short line in blocky pixels signals gaming or chiptune themes at a glance.

Game interfaces in Russian or Greek

Cyrillic and Greek characters were added to the original Latin set, so localised menus keep the pixel style.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Greek

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Cyrillic, Greek. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: cyrillic, cyrillic-ext, greek, latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Press Start 2P

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Press Start 2P on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Press Start 2P";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/PressStart2P-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Press Start 2P", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Press Start 2P with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Press+Start+2P&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Sizes should be multiples of 8

The outlines sit on an 8-pixel grid. At 8px, 16px, 24px and so on the pixels are crisp; other sizes blur or distort them.

One style

Press Start 2P has a single Regular file. There is no bold or italic, and it is not a variable font.

Wide characters

Each glyph fills a square cell, so lines run long; the family name alone spans well over half of the specimen width.

Romanian and Vietnamese are not covered

Greek, Russian, Turkish and Polish are among the checked languages, but Romanian and Vietnamese are not.

FAQs

Collections with Press Start 2P

• Pixel and arcade fonts

  Bitmap-style and dot-matrix display fonts after 1980s game screens, terminals and LED panels, for retro games and tech graphics.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All display fonts