Widescreen monitors killed off those busy backgrounds, since now developers had to worry about what their interfaces would look like at different aspect ratios, since computers originally adopted 16:10 instead of 16:9, yet some used 16:9 anyways. Since all computer monitors were 4:3 originally, interfaces (and specifically the backgrounds utilized) could be designed to take advantage of this.

My favourite font is Zurich and it's the one I use whenever I'm not custom-making a font for something. :D

Can't think of any tropes right now, but certain fonts have been abused to the point where it's not even funny. I'm thinking of the "Diablo font", and I'm sure some game designers went as low as using fucking Papyrus.

Perhaps as a general rule it could be said that HUDs went from taking a good part of the screen with colorful images and lots of information to simpler ones, to a point where many games show barely anything at all. Also, related to interface, using the arrows for movement (which I do) went out of fashion a long time ago, I think the last big game with that being standard was Half-Life.

A big fad in the early/mid '90s was game titles spelled out in 3d rendered type, just to show off (bonus points for ugly noisy dithering that made it all grey and dull even in 256 colors).

The late '90s were all about rusty industrial textures on everything (Unreal logo, GTA1 title screen and menu backgrounds, all of Quake II including the box art)

Gemini000 wrote:

My favourite font is Zurich and it's the one I use whenever I'm not custom-making a font for something. :D

Heh, good choice (it's a variant of Univers which I always prefer - Arial for amateurs, Helvetica for hipsters). :)

Some time ago I suddenly noticed that quite a few VGA DOS games used bright orange colours against a relatively dark background for the menu font - Rise of the Triad, Descent, Radix: Beyond the Void, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Tyrian (well, it's more of golden than orange), Alien Rampage (red-orange) to name but a few. Apparently this was more or less an independent choice, maybe because orange is bright enough but not too bright as pure red.

MrFlibble wrote:

Apparently this was more or less an independent choice, maybe because orange is bright enough but not too bright as pure red.

...or they were just over-compensating for those long years of orange-less CGA/EGA/Tandy.
VGA Programmer's Handbook, tl;dr version: "1. Throw in as many fade-ins/fade-outs as you can. 2. You have orange. Use it."