I introduced Affluent on June 25, 2004. The name was arbitrary, and in hindsight, not a particularly good choice. The design grew out of my time as art director at Rockstar Games, where I worked on PlayStation 2 titles. On CRT televisions, I noticed that small, crisp fonts often produced a dazzle effect that made text shimmer and difficult to read. Older consoles like the NES and SNES avoided this problem by using larger, tile-based text, but with the PS2’s higher expectations for graphics, we had to experiment with typography directly.

We tested fonts on cheap consumer TVs rather than high-end monitors, and I found that slightly fuzzy, antialiased text was easier to read than perfectly sharp text. The exception was near-horizontal lines, where fuzziness just added clutter. By manually sharpening those while leaving verticals more open, I arrived at the design concept for Affluent: a typeface with unconstrained verticals and quantized near-horizontals. I released it in four styles: Regular, Semi-Bold, Bold, and Italics.

My hope was that game companies would adopt it for small-screen use, but the CRT era was ending, and I never saw Affluent used anywhere. It didn’t attract attention or comment, but it directly influenced my work on Cinecav. The same ideas carried over, though in a less severe form, and became central to that project.

I gave Affluent technical updates twice: on May 12, 2021, when I removed deprecated characters, expanded OpenType fractions, and refined outlines, and again in December 2024, when I adjusted vertical metrics, modernized the name tables, and corrected non-breaking space width.