Letterbox

Software theme

Uses letterboxing to allow unsupported aspect ratios to display correctly.

57
games
9
platforms
Letterboxing functions by placing black strips on the top and bottom portion of the screen, covering anything that normally wouldn't be visible in the supported aspect ratio.

Some old games used these regardless, calling them some variation of movie screen or some such. In these instances it had the benefit of lowering the amount of rendering needed and made the games run faster on slower systems, nowadays it rarely accomplishes that.

Usually seen in games intended for 16:9 or other widescreen aspect ratio with the expectation that players may still have 4:3 screens in use.
See also: pillarbox

Popular tags

actionadventure anvilengine aspectratio-16-10 aspectratio-16-9 aspectratio-4-3 bink cpplanguage demo depthoffield directx9 download drm drm-activation dvd firstpersonshooter havokphysics inversekinematics lutris netframework nodrm openal opengl serialkey shadermodel3 singlecontroller steamworks ubuntu vorbis widescreen winvista winxp x360pad x86

Parent group

Widescreen support

Games by year

9193959799010305070911131517 123690

The first Letterbox video game was released in 1991.

Ubisoft, Playdead and Number None published most of these games.

Related site

Platforms

Windows 36
Linux 9
Mac OS X 5
N64 2
Amiga 1
PS3 1
X360 1
PS4 1
Mac OS Classic 1