People may laugh now, but kids today don't understand how expensive 3D fonts were back then. Just one 3D font was a major investment and many families had no 3D fonts at all, or had to rent one. As a kid growing up, I dreamed of having a 3D font but I never thought I could have one. Then, one Christmas, there was a package under the tree. A lumpy, 3 dimensional package. It was the only present; my whole family had got together to buy it. Thrilled and bubbling with anticipation, Christmas morning finally came and I had to wait as my family opened their presents first; my dad got a secondhand toothbrush, my mum got a lump of coal. My sister was thrilled by her post-it notes and my gran got a biscuit. And then it came to my turn and my gran said, "we all got together and I went and chose it just for you" and I tore off the newspaper wrapping and ribbons made of recycled strips of sock. it was Comic Sans.

5:42 "Do-It-Yourself Lawyer" - I hope we get to see that one in a future episode

My heart skipped a beat when Clint started to draw on the box with a Sharpie. Luckily, it was just the shrink wrap.

3D fonts were the coolest thing back in the day. I guess many a homework was returned with a 3D title proudly on top.

NGL, I literally laughed out loud when Clint saw this in the brochure, said "I'll have to look at getting that one!" and then it just cuts to "thank you for your purchase!"

Can I just say, I really appreciate that you buy these pristine Win/DOS products, and you actually unwrap and install the software. I can see the reasoning behind never unwrapping such things, but if it wasn't for people like you, we would never see what these boxes came with and how the programs work. Thanks for that, dude.

FU Fun Universtiy... Thats an awesome T-Shirt design i have to admit

Do you remember a time when the term 3-D was a selling point? LGR remembers.

That... actually exceeded my expectations. The software I mean.

well I know what I'm making all my thumbnail text with now

9:10 "Super Word Art" The sequel we never knew we wanted, but we really do.

2:15 Damn, Clint, you got me there for a moment! xD I was like "what the hell are you doing, dude, you're ruining the box!?!" :)

Starting the day with an "Oh Dear" sums up the existential nightmare that is 2020.

Me: _I wonder why Clint grows his fingernails_ Clint: *3:20* *Me:* he’s a werewolf

Maaaaaan, this is SO 90s, love it. I still remember doing abhorrent slides on PowerPoint 97, totally allowed back then.

0:28 he disliked his own video, the madman

"The army ants want you!" is one of the scariest sentences I've ever read.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Expert Software titles. They were cheap as dirt, sold everywhere (Walmart, office supply stores, Target, etc), and had so many oddball programs and games! With my meager allowance in the early 90s I ended up picking up a lot of them. There's just something about the company. They sold cheap software, everything was done on a budget, but they were proud of it and they delivered a working product! At my first real job we used the heck out of Expert Typing for YEARS. (A Job center sort of place. Clients used it to practice typing) The program would run out of a fileshare and and was tiny.. And Kept working on every windows version from windows 95 on Pentium ||s all the way through 64 bit windows 7 on core2 duos. (Until the job center systems were finally replaced with thin clients) The instructors loved it so we never changed it. At some point in storage I found the 80+ boxed copies that were originally purchased.

4:34 3DFONT31.Z and 3DFONT95.Z .. probably different executables, the installer picks one.

re WordArt, there was actually a lot you could do with it. If you open the Drawing and 3D dialogue boxes, they let you customise everything! That might have been introduced in Office 2000, though, so YMMV.

WordArt and the 3d fonts was my shit when I was at primary school. I'm a Graphic Designer now, and I'm 100% sure that its down to this kind of software being about haha

OMG I remember I had this pretty much when it came out! I had a webpage with a spinning 3d text logo and it made me feel like I was the best webdesigner on the planet :)

The thing I love about so many old desktop applications is when they list "8-bit or higher sound card required". How? Why? What audio requirements could a 3d font maker genuinely need to function :D

In these crazy times, it's always nice to watch your videos, recalling a time when we had this innocent faith in technology and faith in our society as a whole!

The way you removed the plastic wrap from the jewel case made my jaw drop. I am suddenly angry at myself for countless hours spent picking at the tabs trying to open it "correctly." Love the videos, love learning new old techniques lol.

I love it when my documents explode in 3D and burn my house down.

I remember seeing that in the bargain bins at Office Max back in the day. Never picked it up though. I always assumed it would be just a bunch of "3D" true type fonts. This actually looks like it would have been fun to play with. Thanks!

YESS!!! DUDE! I bought this at Babbage's with money my grandma gave me for my birthday in 1996. As everyone has noted, it in fact does not create fonts, only images.

9:28 I was actually astonished when the characters from the different objects obeyed their depth information and overlapped each other properly

I love how the fan starts screaming after the textures are applied

I love how you disliked your own video^^

I've had some expert software stuff in the past. This is way better than what I expected from my experience.

I love these blerbs where you look at weird old programs, I’m kind of obsessed with buying programs like this whenever I find them at garage sales, lol.

I blame the opening titles of Superman for creating the whole 3D font concept.

As a 1990s kid who had quite an experience with more or less equivalent Russian DOS software called “PlakatIndex” (it made 3D-ish text and could compose printouts on perforated paper... we made a heavy use of it in 1992-1995 at school where we were, quite innovatively at the time - and indeed wisely - taught not only Basic programming and charting algorithms but actually using what was modern software then, i.e. DOS, Lexicon text processor, Windows 3.1 and later 95, Word, Excel... as well as played Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Mortal Kombat during recesses and after classes - a perk of having an “informatics” teacher as what in the US would be a homeroom teacher), I'd say that it wasn't Expert Software staff who did samples... rather their 10-12-year-old kids. I see a fifth-grader experience and a sixth-grader humor.

Brings back memories from ’99 when I started my own web creation business and started learning 3D Max and all things 3D.

WMF files...hmmm wonder if Samuel L Jackson helped with this? WORDS MOTHER F*****, DO YOU 3D THEM?

this looks way better than i expected. i thumbsd up at your reaction to the wood font on the back of the box, "we're gonna do that xD

Gosh...at one point in time I think my youth group had this program for our slides. This brought back weird memories of barely legible blocky rainbow colored slides projected by a dying bulb upon a bare white wall.

That's some legitimately awesome 3D WordArt software. For real, I'd use that today if I had a purpose for it.

I would have loved this as a kid and I would have loved it now. I need more 3D fonts in my life.

I would have had a blast back in the days with that program, when I was 11-12yo!

I like how you created the word "Farts" in that noxious-looking green word art

I doodled 3D letters and logos in school too. Glad I wasn't the only one.

Expert has a landscape creator. I played with that program for hours a day. I would manipulate the houses, cut and paste parts of the houses together to creat unique homes. Then I would landscape these homes. I had two versions of the program. 3d landscaping and regular expert landscape. I would print them out on my 9pin printer. Never was there a boy with his 386 more content.

Ah, the late 90s/early 2000s "Are ya doing your vacuuming in there son?" "Yes dad, almost done" *Is playing with fonts with the disc in the drive*

I had some many of these Expert Software CDs as a kid. You could often find them on the discount rack in computer stores. So many memories

Happy Thanksgiving from a fellow North Carolinian. Love all your videos!

Your content is always interesting. I've also used WordArt quite extensively as a kid, mainly in Word 2003... You can tweak some parameters with WordArt too... My first experience with a word processing software was at the age of 2 when I decided to write the alphabet and print it. I still remember the struggles I went through but also the intense joy when I had been done. As dumb as it can seem, it was pretty much a feat for a 2-year-old haha! And the days after, I started to do it again, using various font, printed them and displayed them in my bedroom. If you think I was a strange kind of 2-year-old, you are right.

Was shocked for a moment when you wrote on the box!

Made me remember my first 3d modeling software that I used as a kid.

Oh man, I loved Wordart 3D fonts as a kid. Used them for every posterboard school project and then some.

You can customise the word art completely. Bring up the 3d toolbar and you can change the texture, angle, shape. Etc

Corel Draw had some rudimentary 3D-ification tools since Draw 3, and they were incredibly fun to play with. Made the most ridiculous covers for my school reports with that :D

I remember being fascinated by WordArt too when I started using my first PC

I enjoyed playing with fonts on my Amiga, back in the 80's and 90's. Especially that chrome-in-the-desert texture, I really liked 3d chrome fonts!

That was nearly a full fledged LGR main channel review right there god damn hah! Thanks!

Clint's enjoyment of this had me giggling. Good example of why I'm here.

I bought this back in the day. I really wanted my 1990s html pages to pop! And boy howdy did they!

I'm reminded of The Plutonia Experiment's title screen

You had me at, "wood 3D font." I'm sold

I had this. I think it was on a magazine CD, like Computer Shopper or something. I also was strangely fascinated with that sort of thing. Also had a kids word processor with cool bits and bobs to put on the screen called Creative Writer. More fun than pencils. Actually, I quite like pencils now.

Thanks for keeping 90s computing alive.

I was thinking “flushflushflush” until I saw FUn University! But seriously, I’m somewhat impressed at how smoothly the 3D text renders when it’s being moved around in real time.

Microsoft Publisher wordart, that takes me back! I was a god among men for using that on my school homework in the very early 90's lol. Even if it was printed out on a monocolour dot matrix printer LOL. I love these random big box software, people made software for basically everything in the hope of jumping on the computing bandwagon.

Totally had this back in the day. Gotta make those middle school reports pop!

Wow. Much more than I expected. Greetings from Poland :)

"I would have loved this back in the day" he says while he very clearly loves it right now. Hahaha

A very impressive software from the late 1990's.

I used to have a program like this called Instant 3D! The exclamation is part of the title. It was really really good at consuming all the memory and paging to disk until it seemed like it would wear holes through it. Eventually though, you would have words in textured 3D fonts. And sometimes a crash to desktop, with a nice slow line by line redraw of your wallpaper. Those were the days.

Seeing Clint having fun with weird stuff always makes me happy

Can't wait to see you use these for thumbnails and other video arts

I haven't seen this mentioned yet in the comments, WMF is Windows Metafile. Essentially it's a vector format like the much newer SVG. EMF is Enhanced Metafile, the 32-bit version of WMF released in 1992. Inkscape supports reading and writing WMF if you want to losslessly convert to SVG while keeping the vector goodness.

One Christmas as a young boy, my parents got me Expert Quiz Show, a Jeopardy-like game from this same publisher. I figured out at one point that it would accept partial answers as correct (so that, for example, if you entered Washington it would still count as matching George Washington)... which makes sense, to a degree. But if I had no idea what the answer to a question was supposed to be, I just entered "E" and there was a good chance I'd win!

I recall older installers usually asked you if you want shortcuts at the very end of the installation process so if you just cancel the installation after letting it move the program files of course it doesn't do that.

This takes me back to the old gangster days of graphic design in the early 90's using CorelDRAW, PageMaker, QuarkXpress and other stuff from back in the day.

I recently found Escape from Money Island CIB at Goodwill for 6$. And DOS 3.3 for same price. I def picked them up lol. Sent you a message about a crazy retro computer I've never seen I'm trying to find out more about, it was on ebay and may be gone now but it was very unique... Edit: It's a GE Calma computer. Very little info about it out there.

I am glad that I was a young child when word art was a dominant feature in office programs. I can at least forgive myself for lack of good judgement.

damn, I was just the same with drawing 3D words (or "bubble writing" as I called it even when it was more blocky than bubbly), trying to get it perfectly sized for the page and all of the perspectives consistent between letters. irony now that one of the things people do and love about WordArt is having the various templates at different angles from each other together next to each other. although they're still consistent within each piece of WordArt.

Aah yes 2020, when LGR gets excited about 3-D text software and I get excited about a video of LGR getting excited about 3-D text software 💫🌟⭐️👍⭐️🌟💫

of course you went and bought it lol. BTW friendly reminder, go get Dust!! I've already played a while of my old copy and man it's right up your alley, including cheesy low bitrate FMV video acting over 90s CGI backgrounds!

"We got ants!" Oh, that's how.

Tbh even in 2020 that's very impressive.

Fun University! ! ! Thanks for the video, your excitement made my morning.

I thought you doodled on the box itself and I was gobsmacked!

I've been watching so much of your older content, I was surprised to see this is hot off the editor lol

I had Expert Astronomer back in the day and I loved it... I still actually miss its easy little starmap creator ui.

Now I want Windows 95.

WMF = Windows Metafile. Basically, Windows has what's known as the GDI, which it used -- up through Windows XP or so -- as its primary graphical drawing API (excepting DirectX for games and such). Programmers for Windows used calls into the GDI API to render graphics against what was known as a device context. A device context (or DC) was an abstraction that represented a section of the screen, a hard copy output device such as a printer, or an off-screen buffer. WMF was built into Windows and provided a different kind of DC: one which simply recorded the draw calls performed against it and saved them into a file. These draw calls could then be loaded from the file and "played back" onto another DC, yielding the target image intended to be drawn. It was a convenient way of storing data in a scalable vector format that took advantage of the drawing primitives already built into Windows.

14:45 best part ever! I kept returning just to laugh some more! love it! 😂😂

Fun facts! WMF files can be imported into Inkscape. They were also used for the majority of graphics in Microsoft Bob.

I was addicted to home 3D BUILD, I BUILT SO many dream homes, they never happened. but still software is pretty descent for the cost.

I have one of those in the attic somewhere. Used it for my early website designing.

Hola Clint from Edinburgh! I'm sorry this comment is in plain 2D! Great video and awesome channel you got man.

Now use it to create a title banner for an Angelfire homepage

Now if it could animate the 3D words into GIFs as was popular on 90s era websites, that'd be even better... :P

I use to love making 3D text as a kid also.

Really cool Clint! Also, Paint 3D comes with windows 10 now.

Clint: draws on plastic wrap. /Knife 🔪, cuts plastic wrap Also Clint: Fck this plastic on the CD case, /fingernail 🔪

I wonder how any viewers didn't realize the plastic was still on the box and freaked out when you grabbed that sharpie... :-) Now you'll need to make a wood grain LGR badge for your wood grain PC.