Horizontal and vertical titles on Japanese game spines

I thought about posting this in General Gaming, but I think it makes more sense to post it here since it’s related to Japanese. So, I have quite a few Japanese games, and I’ve noticed something about the text on the spines: most of them have the titles written in kana and/or kanji vertically, top to bottom. However, I’ve noticed that some games are written horizontally, from left to right. In particular, the Japanese PS1 games I own (I only have 3 of them) have kana written horizontally. Also, it seems that with PS1 games, although the text on the case is horizontal, the text on the spine card is vertical - which seems weird.

I have a couple other games that have kana written horizontally: Wave Race 64’s title is written horizontally, as ウエーブレース６４. This is my only boxed Japanese N64 game, so I don’t know if this is common to all N64 games or just this game. Also, although all of my other Japanese Dreamcast games have text written vertically, What’s Shenmue - which has no spine card - is written horizontally. I think in this case it’s because it contains the English word “What’s” in addition to シェンムー, so it makes sense that it needs to be written horizontally, since English has to be written horizontally.

Other than these exceptions, it seems that most games have vertical text. So my question is this: why do they choose vertical text for some games and horizontal text for others? Vertical text makes sense for games, since, if the game is on a shelf in a store, the spine will be vertical. So why did they sometimes choose horizontal text instead? Also, how does this compare to text on spines of other media, like movies, music, books, etc.?

 

Because like everything in Japan they can't make their bloody mind up. that's why there are two ways to say something like fantasy over here. Fantashi or Fantazi (fantaji)

 

Based on the (admittedly unscientific) basis of the stack of PS1 games I have here, it looks like kana and kanji are written vertically and english is written horizontally - in most cases this is true even if both scripts are used on the same label.

I.E. "ストリートファイター EX Plus Alpha" - the katakana is vertical and the "EX plus alpha" is horizontal

This also holds up for the 3 and 4 disc games in the dual CD cases - in this case, they are typically labeled in both English (horizontal) and Japanese (vertical).

The only place I can see out of the 40 or so games I have here where this breaks down is ぷよぷよBOX - where the "BOX" is also written vertically.

 

I only have 3 Japanese PS1 games, and all 3 have kana written horizontally on the case, and the ones that have spine cards (2 of them) have kana written vertically on the spine cards. I thought the PS1 games having horizontal kana thing was weird, because all of my Saturn games have kana written vertically on both the case and the spine card.

I guess I already said all of that, but whatever. I can provide pictures if needed.

 

OK, I was just looking at the spines - and they all followed the pattern I mentioned.

I tend to regard the way the text is written on the case front as being part of the graphic design, and that could be anything the designers liked.

This is the (admittedly random) stack of games I was basing it on:

 

This is what I'm talking about:



As you can see, the kana are printed horizontally, as リッジレーサ　サイバースレッド and レイジレーサー.

Here you can see the spine cards, which are printed vertically:



These are all Namco games, so I wonder if this is something specific to Namco.

 

I think it might be - I've just looked at the other PS1 games I have here, and none of them are like that - but none of them are Namco, either...

I think their HUCard packaging for the PC engine was like that, too - so maybe they were just trying to keep things consistent across various product lines.

I also checked the spine cards I had, and they all follow the same alignment as the game cases did.

 

I only have one boxed PC Engine game, Bomberman '93, and it's printed vertically. I'll take a picture later.

 

Isn't that a Hudson Soft game, though? I was thinking it was the Namco games that used that horizontal style.