Some time last year while watching a video I got jumpscared by a logo that used a font that is immediately recognizable as the Quake font, and they used it at the very least 20+ years before Quake 1 even came out. This made me realize that the Quake font wasn't drawn completely from scratch and that it's probably possible to find it, most likely in a book or a digitization by someone. ---------------------------------------- [https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/e3875a72-5d4a-455a-87c6-f2c1f58f05a1/chrome_2023-09-16_02-39-25.jpg] This has been nagging me for some time and I've made several unsuccessful attempts at trying to find it before, but recently I've come across Dan X. Solo's "The Solotype Catalog of 4,147 Display Typefaces", 1992, and under "Stencil fonts" on the page 119 surprisingly actually found a sample for a font named "Visa", as pictured above. Checking Dan X. Solo's other books lead me to an earlier book named "Stencil Alphabets: 100 Complete Fonts", published in 1988, and turns out there's an entire page dedicated to this font showing the entire alphabet and numbers and other characters. [https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/cb178dcc-fea9-403a-bcba-bebb404b8d7d/e9780486168883_i0098.jpg] While differences between this sample and both the Schott logo and final result in Quake are present, similarities between most of letterforms and some really specific ones like X and Y make me believe that Visa (or, more likely, its progenitor or a derivative because legally it's a typography free-for-all out there with everyone ripping off each other) was in fact used as a base for the Quake font. edit: According to Luc Devroye's "On Snot and Fonts" [http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44242.html], original Visa font's designer is Raphael Boguslav. > His typeface Avia (VGC) was an expansion of a logofont he did for Abex Corporation, almost like a stencil. It is now at Font Bureau, where Jill Pichotta has added the Light and Bold in 2000. His typeface Visa (1966, VGC) won the Second Prize in the 1966 VGC National Type Face Design Competition. Others (thanks, Alexander Tochilovsky) confirm what I thought---that Visa and Avia are the same thing. Excerpt from the official promotional PDF for FontBureau's Avia [https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/5814a628-676a-4f76-95bb-105d02757125/Avia.png] https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/2173/avia [https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/2173/avia] http://web.archive.org/web/20130617135330/http://www.fontbureau.com/fonts/avia/ [http://web.archive.org/web/20130617135330/http://www.fontbureau.com/fonts/avia/]