Six games you never finished

Six titles in a glowing list. A thick magenta bar sitting over the third one. A small triangle cursor at its left, and scanlines running through all of it.

You played about four minutes of each. You remember this screen better than any of them.

Why is a menu screen worth printing?

Because for a certain kind of afternoon, the menu was the product.

Demo discs came free with magazines and consoles, and the experience they actually delivered was browsing: reading six names, picking one, seeing a slice, going back. Nobody finished anything. What formed was a memory of a list, in a specific typeface, glowing.

It's a strange thing to be nostalgic for and an extremely common one, which is usually a sign there's something real underneath.

What makes the screen look right?

Bloom, scanlines, and a selection bar with weight.

Cathode-ray displays smeared bright colours slightly outward, which is why period screenshots look soft even when the pixels are hard. Scanlines are the physical gaps between raster lines. And the selection highlight was always solid and chunky, because it had to be unmistakable from a sofa.

Those three things together are what the eye reads as console screen. Any one of them alone reads as a graphic with an effect on it.

What should the six titles be?

Invented, and named like the period.

Late-nineties titles ran to two hard nouns or a noun plus a number: RIDGE HAULER, SALT FLATS 99, MOTH KING, TARMAC. The naming convention is tight enough to be easy and specific enough to be funny, and it's where the personality of the shirt lives.

The highlighted one is the design decision. Whatever sits under the bar is the one being chosen, which means it can be a real thing dressed as a game — a project, a place, a person's nickname.

Can I list real games?

Titles and cover art belong to their publishers.

Game names are trademarks and the disc menus themselves were designed artwork. Publishers license this material — there is a whole retro-merchandise business built on exactly that — but it has to be licensed before anything is printed or sold.

Invented titles cost nothing and mean the list is yours. It's the same trade as naming a film that doesn't exist.

Does it work as a personal design?

It's one of the better formats in this bucket for it.

A list of six things with one highlighted is a structure that takes almost any content: six places somebody lived with the current one selected, six jobs, six bands, six years. The selection bar makes a statement without writing a sentence.

Which is the same job the red dot does on a programme page — one mark of choosing, inside a neutral list.

Is this too specific to one console generation?

The format outlived the hardware.

Menus that look like this appeared on discs, on magazine cover-mounts, on kiosk machines and on early DVD players. The visual language — glowing list, chunky highlight, scanlines — reads as the late nineties rather than as any one machine, which is broader and also safer.

Does it print well?

Yes, with the glow kept tight.

Bitmap type at a generous size is hard-edged and safe. The two risks are both soft: bloom that spreads too far turns to grey haze on cotton, and scanlines drawn too fine will either vanish or moiré against the weave. Fewer, heavier scanlines read better than accurate ones.

Washed black and charcoal grounds. Two inks — cyan for the list, magenta for the selection bar — is the whole palette and it's already loud.

How do I get one made?

Describe the menu at JustOG — the six titles, and which one is highlighted. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Six names, four minutes each, and one screen you can still see with your eyes shut.