Press Start 2P is a bitmap font based on the font design from 1980s Namco arcade games. Although the design of uppercase letters and digits dates back to Atari's "Sprint" (1977), the specific glyph forms in this TrueType conversion are based on those from "Return of Ishtar" (1986), one of the first games to include and regularly use lowercase as well as uppercase letters in its screen font.
Unlike the original font from the "Return of Ishtar" ROM, Press Start 2P includes a wide variety of non-ASCII Unicode characters for pan-European use, including Greek and Cyrillic.