I started playing Teen Agent and Flight of the Amazon Queen this morning, and I noticed they use the exact same font as the Lucasarts adventure games.

Legend of Kyrandia does so as well (Albeit a bit blown up in comparison)

Was this a trend back in the 90's?

It is good to hear you enjoy the games available here for free. I do not know the actual answer to your question, so I would let someone who has (or feels they have) more knowledge on the matter answer for certain.

But my guess would have something to do with readability and obtrusion into the gaming screen when the games were designed for 800x600 screens.

Well, they're free, why wouldn't I enjoy them? :D (Unless they suck) but so far I'm enjoying Flight of the Amazon, and Beneath a Steel Sky. Teen Agent I haven't really figured out yet.

I really like this avatar...... also I should give those free games a try if they are actually good. I don't know but the box art had me "meh"

Might be the use of middleware or a module in the programming language they used.

Quite a few of the free games are good and worth your time!
Flight of the Amazon Queen is pretty good... The three Ultima games are also definitely worth it.
And Beneath a Steel Sky is fantastic imo. Maybe not as good as Broken Sword, but still a great classic point and click adventure! :)

I played Teen Agent as a little girl and loved it. I have replayed it here and enjoyed it as much as the first time.

As for the fonts I have no idea.

I love my Avatar too. "The Gamercat" is a really fun webcomic :3

http://tapastic.com/episode/162017

TYRIAN!

That is all. :P

I remember back in the 90's there were font cd's for sale, which included like 100 fonts... Buying one, selecting the best/most appropriate one seems likely. Although for DOS games the fonts are all going to be bitmaps and pre-generated rather than TTF.

Course this was when Windows 3.0 was still kicking it off and getting popular-ish... so 1992-1994

Especially around the holidays!

TYRIAN 2K! (the opensource port runs faster btw)

Well, if you use "Nothing Special" in the context of "exactly like most other adventure games at the time" yeah, it's nothing special. I can't even theorize that they ripped off/stole the font from Lucasarts because really, there is no copyright on fonts.

All creative works are copyright controlled by default in the post-1973 copyright conventions. This includes fonts, most of which are absolutely copyrighted and some are expensive to buy.

That these various games all used what appear to be the same font could have a few explanations.

1 - They're all built using scumm or something which came with a default font they used.
2 - They licensed the same screen-font (likely if it was good & cheap)
3 - Someone provided that font under free availability via some means, such as part of a dev kit, or simply on a BBS somewhere etc.
4 - They're not actually the same font, just very similar.
5 - Developers back then weren't worried about suits over minor assets like this

I'm sure I missed some

It would be interesting to know the actual story, but probably only a few people who worked on those games would know now.