This would be much more convincing by writing out the entire words instead of overlaying a very small sample of the font next to a screenshot of the Quake menu. As it stands it's very hard to draw a conclusion.
Quake 1 potential original font
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Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#12Agree with all the other comments saying this specific connection seems iffy and rather unlikely. The many significant differences cited are strong evidence, G and Q and R are entirely different. The most distinctive feature of Visa aside from the stencil dropouts is the missing ‘lost and found’ strokes with A, N, V, and W, and Quake’s font doesn’t have this feature at all.
On top of that there are a billion stencil fonts! There are thousands of them that narrow near the stencil dropouts. Seems like the author is making wild speculation.
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#13Way too many differences for it to be a feasible origin typeface. This post is based on a few similar-looking letters but they’re not even that similar-looking: the O, for example, has a different curvature.
I’m not sure if is really is the font, but I suspect the font in Quake started as some conventional font and then was modified to fit the aesthetic of the game. Specifically, to make it look more threatening, because the 90’s ruled and even the fonts were edgy. The O is, I think, looming, and the T is a dagger.
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#14While I agree the correlation is iffy, I'm happy to see continued and growing interest in documenting and appreciating the origins and uniqueness of classic retro games. Regarding the origins of this font, I'm curious why someone hasn't asked the people involved. After all, the development of early Id games have been the focus of many books, scholarly papers, retrospectives and histories. Best of all the original sources are still available (Carmack, Romero, Abrash and, I assume, many others).
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#15Yikes I really hope this doesn't stir up any new lawsuits.
Some stones are best left unturned...
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#16Yikes I really hope this doesn't stir up any new lawsuits. Some stones are best left unturned...
Fonts are a funny thing. Like recipes they were often cloned, some companies sold sets. I bought a Mac clone and it came with a cd of fonts from “bitstream”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Inc
“The company received extensive criticism for its strategy of cheaply offering digitisations of pre-existing typefaces that it had not designed. While technically not illegal, font designer John Hudson would describe its selling of large numbers of typefaces on CD at discount prices as "one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type".
Like a lot of font foundries, monotype ended up buying that one.
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#17Way too many differences for it to be a feasible origin typeface. This post is based on a few similar-looking letters but they’re not even that similar-looking: the O, for example, has a different curvature.
I wouldn't put too much weight on curvature differences, that's an inevitable part of turning curved letterforms into a bitmap font. The letters would obviously have required significant pixel-by-pixel tweaking to look good on a 320x240 raster.
Quake didn't even present the bitmaps in a consistent aspect ratio or size, it did a 1-to-1 pixel copy regardless of the target pixel shape/size. Quake shipped with a 320x200 default resolution in 1996, with configurable support for a variety of resolutions including 320x240. Over time, most people ended up on a 4:3 resolution on a 4:3 display.
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#18This isn't really convincing. The P, G, R and Y are significantly different and appear in both the Quake sample and the font sample. S is significantly flatter. The cherry-picked examples are the most basic letters and likely to have parallel evolution because of the constraints of that design space. I think it's more likely to be a hand-crafted font, inspired by the general layout of stencil letters but no more than…
Yeah — a bunch of inspirations for this. Wouldn't be surprised if the designer was inspired by newly-released Emigre typefaces like Democratica.
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#19I don't buy this at all. Too many differences, and at this resolution it is not that improbable for any font to have a doppelganger.
Instead of looking for which vector font that have been rasterised at this resolution, I would sooner look for the font in bitmap font collections like this:
https://github.com/ianhan/BitmapFonts
I wouldn't be surprised though if the font was created 'from scratch'
Re: Quake 1 potential original font
#20While I agree the correlation is iffy, I'm happy to see continued and growing interest in documenting and appreciating the origins and uniqueness of classic retro games. Regarding the origins of this font, I'm curious why someone hasn't asked the people involved. After all, the development of early Id games have been the focus of many books, scholarly papers, retrospectives and histories. Best of all the original sou…
Agreed, although when they simply used a font without attribution I doubt there'll be a response.