SCELBI’s Galaxy Game for the 8008/8080
SCELBI Computer Consulting, Inc., was (briefly and significantly) a 1970s microcomputer manufacturer but was mostly known in that era for its technical publications. The cover work for some of the early books features plenty of fun with photo lettering. The company name was often rendered in Koloss, as it is here. Helvetica is the baseline text choice, and Avant Garde Gothic with multiple ligatures is used for the title.
The Galaxy game was a space conquest adventure, in the vein of the classic Star Trek games from early computing. The books (available for the Intel 8008/8080 systems as well as the Motorola 6800) contained the whole game, reproduced as machine language code with explanations for both gameplay and how the program worked.
SCELBAL was a version of BASIC for SCELBI’s own computer system, and the title of its book is set in Baby Arbuckle, a follower of Baby Fat.
The company’s First Book of Computer Games is less aesthetically coherent. It repeats the Helvetica and Koloss, then throws Neil Bold, Pioneer, and Dubbeldik into the mix.
More on the SCELBI computer in the context of early micro computing can be found here, while a number of SCELBI’s books are available at the SCELBI Museum and the Internet Archive.
