Quake 1 potential original font | Hacker News Reader

Quake 1 potential original font

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181 pointsta12345678929 comments

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.

Yeah — a bunch of inspirations for this. Wouldn't be surprised if the designer was inspired by newly-released Emigre typefaces like Democratica.

The N is completely different; Quake has a one-piece N, the font slices it into three separate parts.

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.

The Q is obviously custom (Q for "Quake") the question is where the starting point for the font was. I agree about the cherry picking, but the font is going to have been modified for the game (as evidenced by the "Q".)

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

I don’t agree with the assertion made in the article but if they did use a font without securing permission I somehow doubt Shor would want to admit that, so sometimes you do need something other than a first party source.

>> ...but if they did use a font without securing permission...

IANAL but I believe you can trace even a commercial font and use it. Making a bitmap font from print and using it in a game should be fine.

There was a Quake 4?! ...ah yes... no.. heh?

Must've blotted it out to preserve the affection I had for the first 3.

It was a sequel to Quake II by Raven Software, using id Tech 4 (DOOM 3), notable for having a first-person cutscene in which you are "stroggified", transformed into one of the mechanical zombie soldiers you've been fighting against all game (but your NPC teammates save you at the last second before the brain implant that removes your free will is implanted). Apparently at the time, this was talked about lots in the marketing leading up to release, but when I played it as a kid, I never knew anything about that, so it was a real shock when I got to that part.

One cool thing the game did was they used the DOOM 3 "interactive panels" tech to make not only English-language human-manufactured "touchscreens", but also Strogg-language alien-manufactured "touchscreens", that you had to interact with to open doors and so forth. After becoming "stroggified", the glyphs on the Strogg touchscreens shift and you can now read them in English.

I went back and replayed it a few years ago and it's really pretty generic as far as shooters of that era go, but I thought Raven did a decent job given what they had to work with.

I believe I probably started playing it when it came out, but abandoned it pretty early on, hence my initial confusion - like something you half remember.

The first 3 games though were great in their different ways, but Quake 1 will always be my favourite.

I used to sneak into my older sister's room to play it on her PC when I was a kid. I remember the stage with the toxic chemical facility or whatever it was, where the dead bodies would rise up behind you after you passed them by. I was too scared to play past it after getting jumpscared several times from behind, lol.

It was 'ok', it however, gave us the excellent ET:QW which was unbelievably good fun.

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).

Agreed, although when they simply used a font without attribution I doubt there'll be a response.

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.

This isn't viral mutation we're talking about here. An artist easily could have redrawn the O because of some issue or purely taste. There's a lot of commonalities and the article seems interesting and potentially correct.

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.

Yes, the A in Quake is very different having a small bridge in the cross piece, whereas the font shown omits the lefthand stroke almost entirely to create a bridge.

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.

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'

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.

> We have all seen proofs where faulty platemaking or light inking has lost all hairlines in a delicate roman. Raphael Boguslav observed the effect and understood it as a sophisticated form of stencil design.

Two clicks in.

Agreed. I was thinking how, even if you somehow create something in isolation, all it can do is stand on its own. A thing created on top of decades and centuries of other creations stands taller, it has history and context.

Yikes 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.

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