- This 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 that.
- Agree 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.
- You could probably just ask Sasha Shor:
“As one of the creative leads on the id software brand team at Pyro in Texas, I worked on the logo, font, packaging and advertising,
as well as the global E3 launches, for Quake, Quake 2, 3 and 4, some of the most iconic video game launches in the history of gaming.”
http://www.sashashor.com/new-page
- While 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).
- I think the A and the N nix this theory. It’s almost more like the Quake font designer saw this font, remembered the concept of hairlines reduced to nothing, but when they applied the concept they made different choices on which hairlines to apply it to.
- Way 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.
by risenshinetech
0 subcomment
- 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.
- I 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'
by greenthrow
2 subcomments
- Doubtless there is a font that inspired Avia and one that inspired that and on and on. This is the true nature of creativity. Not the mythical creation born of nothing.
by thelastparadise
1 subcomments
- Yikes I really hope this doesn't stir up any new lawsuits.
Some stones are best left unturned...
Hacker News