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Shadowrun is a roleplaying game that was first released in 1989 by FASA Corporation, and is still published today in its current, sixth edition. For most of those editions, the primary typeface for body text has been Friz Quadrata (1966), which was also used for the game’s logo for the first and second editions (the latter from 1992), shown above.
Page from the main rulebook for the first edition of Shadowrun, from 1989, showing Friz Quadrata in both regular and bold varieties, as well as faux bold italics for the quote below the chapter title, as no true italics were available at the time.
Note the straight quote marks. FASA Corporation is known to have used Apple Macintoshes at their office, so the text was most likely laid out in columns on a computer but then pasted up for printing. (Early books often include a “Paste Up” credit; this particular one doesn’t.)
Page from the Street Samurai Catalog (1989, though this one is actually from the revised edition from 1992), a supplement for Shadowrun. Body text is Futura, with the page title in Helvetica Compressed and some small bits in Aachen.
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Revised game logo for the third edition (1998), using a modified Friz Quadrata.
Front cover of New Seattle by Stephen Kenson. Originally published by FASA in 1999, this is a later edition by FanPro. All text on the cover, except for the stock number, is Tribe (1997); the stock number is Bronzo (1992). The latter was also used for the titles on the spines of most of the later third-edition books (though not on this one).
Page from New Seattle, showing the chapter title and drop capital in Badloc (1989). Body text of third-edition books was still Friz Quadrata, and even though by this time true italics of this existed, Shadowrun books kept using faux versions instead.
The statistics block below the map is in Futura Condensed, while the fictional “comments” in the text are ITC Avant Garde Gothic, as are some of the captions on the map. The circled arrow that starts off each comment is the greater-than symbol from Badloc, though set larger and lower than it would be if set at the same point size as the text itself.
Page header in New Seattle, in Tribe.
Typical page header for a third-edition Shadowrun book, also using Tribe.
2 Comments on “Shadowrun logo and books”
I think the text copy in the books signals Friz Quadrata as a guess.
It is Friz Quadrata, yes. I intend to expand this article to cover more of the typefaces used in this game, but haven’t got round to that yet.