The Secret Other Life of Sonic 2's Font

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]When you see this font, what does it make you think of? Cool. Now, check this out. Personally, I laughed out loud when I first saw this. It's the font from the level title cards in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The one I specifically used to indicate I'm doing a Sega Genesis Sonic cover, but here's a trombonist in a Tux using it in 1980 for this compilation of his old tunes. I grew up having literally only ever seen this font in reference to Sonic 2. So, personally, there's something just so jarring to seeing it used so casually in a decidedly unSonic type setting. And just to be clear, this guy's a dope player.

[00:00:31]Here's another fun one. This is the font on a European release of a record so obscure, I'm still not sure if I've heard what's on this album or not. I like how they continued the lines here.

[00:00:42]And here's another batch of super obscure ones I found. Some of them strike me as particularly odd to look at given how I've been raised to associate this style with a speedy punk blue hedgehog in a video game. Yet, here it is with like a poker band and this Eastern European singer songwriter. In fact, here's the quickest way I've found to discover uses of this font throughout history. Go to discog.com, find advanced search, pick a year between 1977 and 1980, and filter for Germany or Italy. You should find a few after not too many pages of digging.

[00:01:14]Although it's not the most common font in the music industry, there are clearly a ton more fun ones out there that I have yet to uncover. Here's some that I found from Japan in the8s, but I couldn't find quite as many in that market. Luckily for anybody as curious as me about this exact topic, there's a website called fonts in use that seems to be curated by very experienced people in the design and typography industry.

[00:01:34]Through this page, I found out that this is a font called Rocco. Designer Kus Clemens created it all the way back in 1973 for a design competition hosted by type setter company Electraet.

[00:01:46]This competition would also produce other winning fonts that would appear on album covers for decades to come. I'm not really an expert on this stuff, but it seems like people ended up licensing these types of fonts from Letet, a type setter, to make typographic designy things for albums and logos in a time before computer fonts were really accessible to the masses. So yeah, I'm assuming that Letraet would end up giving Mr. Clemens some type of buyout or royalty deal. And this is how it ended up as part of their catalog for some time. And over the next 10 years, it would appear in more places than you might think. We're going to get back more into Mr. Clemens and his font later, but first I want to bring this back to the Sonic community for just a second. I could be wrong about my overall impressions on this, but when I was growing up checking out the various message boards that discuss Sonic 2 in extensive detail, I remember there being some confusion about what this font is, even a slight air of mystery to it. I remember for a while people were creating templates for Sonic 2 level cards that were using an impostor font, which ironically is called Gaslight.

[00:02:41]Sure. It's in the same vein of art deco old school Broadwayish kind of stuff, but you can see from the A having two slants and not just the one that these two are at least a little different. In fact, the uneven choice of slanting seems to be one of the primary distinctions of this font. Up until very recently, I myself assumed that this was a Sega in-house design just for the fact that I literally couldn't recall ever seeing it anywhere else. And I don't know about you, but I literally see this nowhere nowadays other than Sonic.

[00:03:09]And I can see a couple plausible reasons for it missing that sort of mass adoption like a comic sands or papyrus type font.

[00:03:18]While working with Rocco for my thumbnails, I've noticed it becomes a lot less legible in smaller resolution situations. And I'm guessing that mattered pretty heavily in the late ' 80s, early '9s, where a lot of fine details and little unexpected twists here and there in the lettering that seem to require a larger number of pixels on screen than usual to make it look right. And in fact, since Yujinaka was specifically trying to display the power of the Mega Drive with Sonic 2, it's possible the team chose this because it was mildly graphically impressive for letters on screen at the time. Second, they seem to have only let a few publishers digitize these fonts at first as opposed to just sort of letting it out there. The version of it I downloaded is actually called Wright Bank LF, and it was part of this pack you had to buy in 1986 through 1992.

[00:04:03]Despite it not reaching a sort of general mass adoption, it seems like a few designers across the globe have gravitated towards this font as a starting point and even a finished product for company logos. Let's check this one out for a moment. One of the companies I found to use this font was a VHS distribution company called Maris or Marquee Video Corporation. Here they used the font with no alterations, just for their company logo. And I was curious if maybe they had like a presert animation with this logo like the level titles of Sonic 2. But all I could find was this ominous screen. And speaking of film, check out this storefront at a vintage movie memorabilia shop in France.

[00:04:41]This brings me back to one of the most interesting points here and possibly the reason I made this video in the first place. So, for context, if you'll recall, some of the album covers that sported Rocco were sort of old school swing or jazz albums. And in fact, that music was already retro at the time of these releases in the 70s and 80s, meaning this could have been used as a call back to the roaring 20s jazz age fonts. In general, the whole art deco era was sort of known for these engraved, mass-roduced, postery type things, and that became synonymous with classic theater and jazz at the time.

[00:05:17]So, for years, it seems like Rocco was utilized as a retro jazz age font, or like a retro theater font. I've seen it used so much in this context that I'm positive there's a generation of people out there who also grew up at least loosely aware of this font but perceiving it as a jazz thing rather than as a hedgehog thing. Meanwhile, a separate generation has grown up associating it with a hedgehog. So, you could show this to two different people and they might pick up stunningly different auras from it, stunningly different nostalg. And honestly, I don't know too many other things that sort of exist in this exact cultural balance.

[00:05:50]Here's a few of them from an old school design book.

[00:05:54]I'm almost positive that this panext company was a translation company based out of the Netherlands, and I can't find any info on these other two. Whoever uploaded this did such a valuable service to anybody doing this kind of research, but seem to have forgotten to scan the index page with all the designer and company names. I did manage to find a department store logo for some place called Espresso that actually did designy things with this font. Instead of just typing it out, they sort of bookended the word with a larger version of the first and last letter. This one seems to have been the logo for a department store in Sabu Malls in the8s.

[00:06:22]And unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture of it. But yeah, one of their stores was probably in one of these buildings. So, this is the point where after a couple weeks of digging, I figured I'd report my findings. To sum it up, the font scene in all these title cards is called Rocco. Sega did not invent it. This designer named Kus Clemens did in 1973 for a competition.

[00:06:41]And although it's not common, you can find it having been used in many other decidedly unsonicy places through the 70s and 80s.

[00:06:49]This is where I eventually would have ended my research, but while lying awake one night at 1:00 a.m., I decided to take a stroll through the malls of the 70s and 80s. Like I said, this typography book references an actual store called Espresso that reworked Rocco font for their logo. So, I figured there might be some old photos of the interiors of these malls, either from personal photos or promotional stuff.

[00:07:09]And that's when Google's algorithm started showing me the beautiful world of vapor wave images, which are actually real places.

[00:07:16]I'm not quite convinced this is how it looked like in person, but these photographs make malls in the8s just look incredible.

[00:07:27]And until I kind of went on this dive, I didn't realize the sheer scale of this aesthetic and how prevalent it was in America's indoor malls of the 80s. And then after a while of wandering around retro malls, I came across this.

[00:07:43]Sunost Motion Picture Company was a blockbuster style rental store with employees who actually nerded out over movies and wanted to info dump about obscure directors to you. Their stores featured these massive TV displays, tons of neon, and of course, palm trees of various shapes, sizes, and material.

[00:07:59]Some of these photos come from a YouTube video I found that a former manager made showcasing the history of the place and seemingly having really enjoyed their time working with the people here over the years.

[00:08:15]Now, you may already be aware that Eugji Naga moved to California to produce Sonic 2 at Sega Technical Institute.

[00:08:21]They even took reference photos of California, which they then turned into level concepts for the game. They literally took the name Emerald Hill from this neighborhood a few minutes away from their building. They even based Oil Ocean Zone off of the aesthetic of the offshore oil rigs. So, just out of curiosity, I decided to look up how close Sega Technical Institute would have been to a Sun Coast location.

[00:08:39]Yeah, there's a Sun Coast at this Northgate Mall about an hour away from Sega Technical Institute. It really seems to me like there's a chance somebody from the tea made it into this store in '91 or '92 when it was at its peak. Maybe even to check out the displays in the video game section.

[00:08:54]And if I put the tin foil hat on for a moment, maybe some of the design elements that made it into Sonic 2 were inspired by the aesthetic here. It was a colorful, funky place with video games and palm trees in California up the road from STI and literally features the iconic Sonic 2 font as his logo.

[00:09:12]Tinfoil hat off. It's not really that important whether or not photos of Sun Coast directly influenced Sonic 2. I'm sure it's safe to say there was just something in the air in the '90s which called for this type of vibe. There's the raw optimism of the '9s. The computer graphics featuring checkerboard, red sports cars, palm trees, brightcolored grids. This stuff was just kind of happening at the time.

[00:09:36]Check out the works of Eisen Suzuki for more of this. He clearly influenced the vibe of Sonic.

[00:09:47]All right, let's bring it back to Mr. Roco himself, Kus Clemens. Although his letter competition bio is pretty beefy, I could only find a handful of logos and some stamp designs that he did. And then I ran into this. It seems like he was part of the team that actually designed this double rail logo, which would be a long-standing icon of British Rail for about 50 to 60 years. Even as this entity moved between the private and public sector, this has apparently just been a longstanding emblem. And it actually was Kus Clemens's design that was chosen for this. However, his design wasn't this one. What he made was this one. And unfortunately, a leaked copy of this ended up in the office, and the higher-ups were just not too enthused by it. So, they ordered a round of reddrafts and redoss through the entire office, and somebody else's design was chosen.

[00:10:40]Now, don't get me wrong, I might be the number one Kalis Clemens fan in all of the United States. However, I could see why this design wasn't chosen. It probably wasn't the most timeless to me.

[00:10:50]It sort of looks like a peace sign with an arrow and it might have just been a product of the peace 1160s. And in any case, it's also at least possible that if he had received some cushy company bonus or internal office prize or promotion from making this logo that maybe he wouldn't have entered the electric competition at all, and he might not have accidentally gifted the blue hedgehog one of his notable typographic styles. Now, if this story is true, I'm not sure how much of a consolation prize the whole Sonic thing would be to Mr. Clemens. And to be honest, it seems like he ended his career with enough accolades as it is.

[00:11:21]His bio in the Electric competition seems pretty happy to begin with, but I really do hope that at some point in his life, he managed to run into a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and at some point started up Emerald Hillzone at least once, if not only to have him see his E not quite load right in the two-player version.

[00:11:40]I want to give one last humongous thank you to my patrons. I know this one was a pretty obscure and maybe not typical project for this channel, but thank you all for sticking around. Stay safe everybody. Have a dub week out there.