I released Forgotten Futurist on March 25, 1998 as a follow-up to Hemi Head, which I had finished a month earlier. While Hemi Head was based directly on 1960s Dodge and Plymouth muscle car logos, Forgotten Futurist removed the gaps, giving the forms a more solid, blocky structure. The first version was rough, showing the effects of Fontographer’s weight filter in the corner strokes, but it set the basis for the design.

In 2000, I rebuilt the font, cleaning up the earlier outlines and expanding it into a small family: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold-Italic, and a Shadow style with outlines and a drop-shadow. All of those were free to use. In the 2010s, I expanded Forgotten Futurist into a ten-style family. Using the improved Regular as a base, I rebuilt the Shadow and added Hairline, Thin, Extra-Light, Light, Semi-Bold, Heavy, and Black, each with italics except for the Shadow. At that point, only the four basic styles remained free; Shadow and the new weights were licensed commercially.

Version 6.1, released on October 30, 2024, reorganized the weight names for clarity: Book became Light, Light was renamed Extra-Light, Extra-Light became Thin, and Ultra-Light was renamed Hairline. That update also corrected some small errors in the Shadow style. Forgotten Futurist found a fair amount of use in video games, though it never reached the popularity of Neuropol. I always saw it as a deliberately plain design, a contrast to flashier techno styles.