The Secret of St. Brides text adventure game by The Games Mistresses

The Games Mistresses were a somewhat secretive games studio operating out of St. Bride’s, a boutique holiday destination that allowed adults to experience life as a 1920s boarding-school pupil. Their games were published in the 1980s and they specialised in text adventures. Aaron A. Reed has an intriguing write-up in a blog post published in June 2021.

The first title is The Secret of St. Brides, produced for the ZX Spectrum. It uses Binner for the title on the cassette inlay and the cassette itself. Other typefaces used for the inlay are Broadway Engraved (“The St. Bride’s”), Gallia (“Adventure Guide”), Volta (“Watch out for …”), Grotesque No. 9 (“Raffles” etc.), and ITC Zapf Chancery (“Setting Out …”). All of these faces were available from Letraset for dry transfer lettering at the time. The body copy is set in Times, and “Distributed by Audiogenic Software Ltd.” in Helvetica Bold. The ISBN and barcode numbers are from OCR-A and OCR-B, respectively. “48K Spectrum” appears to be hand-written lettering.

The racy advert shown at the end of this post uses a quote, St. O’Trinians, set in Broadway Engraved for the title. The quote itself is a sort of pun playing on St. Trinians and the Mistresses’ home country of Ireland. The body text of the advert is one of the commercially popular sans-serif typefaces, probably Helvetica.