Tracking down the true origin of a font used in many games and shareware titles | Hacker News Reader

Tracking down the true origin of a font used in many games and shareware titles

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133 pointsLammy15 comments

I guess I'm just an old man but I truly do not understand why people use twitter for long-form content like this. It's like using the handle of a screwdriver as a hammer. You can do it but it sure isn't optimal. I understand there are a few tools to make it a little better to read, but that's a band-aid on the problem.

I’m not on Twitter myself, but I imagine it’s simply about putting the content where your audience is. How many people will click through a tweet’s link vs. engaging on the platform itself? Also, if you have a Twitter account but not one for longer-form work, are you going to set up something new just to say one thing that’s longer than usual?

Once you put it into ThreadReaderApp it becomes much more readable and pleasant.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1200243842521415681.html

Is it 'long-form' content or is it a series of points in an overall thread, most of which focus on an image? It could almost be a gallery of images with captions, but I think it would seem very out of place on imgur, for example.

I can’t think of a much better alternative, really. Maybe Medium, but I’d expect something there to be more content than this, with more rewriting and editing. This is more like a 'stream of thoughts'. Is there a specific harm in it being posted on Twitter?

I'll concede that this specific thread isn't super long but some of the ones I've seen posted here are incredibly long and it's just frustrating to read them in that format.

Though when you consider the length of a tweet in general compared to the length of the thread, I think I would call it long form compared to the medium it's posted on.

> So, to summarize: A font from an early 1st-party Mac game made it (questionably?) onto some Mac shareware disks. A programmer at EA found it, converted it, and included it with Deluxe Paint. From there, it then appeared in a lot of other games whose artists used that program.

Squaresoft also famously used the original Mac system font, Chicago (designed by Susan Kare) for their English language SNES releases of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III US, Secret of Evermore, etc — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)

The "1st-party Mac game" in question is Through the Looking Glass -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking_Glass_(vid...

Interesting story, though I wonder what the postscript would be if the original author was tracked down?

For anyone checking comments first, the font in question is the script font most famously used in Mortal Kombat.

Steve Capps is the original author and very well known. He wrote many programs for the original Mac. I expect this will make its way back to him and he will chime in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Capps

That’s awfully close to the font used by Smalltalk-76 and later.

Can someone do the same posts but for music in kid YouTube videos? It seems they all have the exact same music/sound effects

If they're from the YouTube Audio Library, then they get used because it doesn't trigger a copyright hit.

1. https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music?nv=1

Wow - great detective work

Hope the old SCO lawyers don't see this. ;)

Url changed from https://threader.app/thread/1200243842521415681, which points to this. (HN readers are divided on which format they like better, and the site guidelines call for original sources.)

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