That font has some unique characteristics (such as the lopsided S and 8). It's not like the Signetics based font from Apple I/II which is very basic, for example.

Also if you look at all the ways letters and numbers have been drawn in C-64, NES, Genesis, and SNES games; there's lots of room for creativity and design even in an 8x8 space.

FWIW, the reason all of the vertical elements in the C-64 font are two pixels wide is to compensate for raster blur on televisions that were common at the time.

If you made a vertical line only one pixel wide, on many televisions like the Panasonic I used it would be nearly impossible to see.

And while color monitors of the day were an improvement, they still weren't what we would consider acceptable today. I eventually upgraded to a Commodore CM-141, and single pixel vertical lines still weren't great.

I made an 8x8 font that was inspired by Broadway [1] and it ended up in most of the company's video gaming machines back in the 80's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_(typeface)

Don't leave us hanging! Tell us more, which games, which company?