Huh? No way was that the first game to implement it. I remember implementing exactly that approach in a simple open source video game in the mid 90s. It was the

Huh? No way was that the first game to implement it. I remember implementing exactly that approach in a simple open source video game in the mid 90s. It was the only practical way to do it with OpenGL1 because textures had to be powers of two in size and you couldn't have all that many of them. I was a very junior/teenage programmer at the time so ended up laying out the glyphs by hand using Paint Shop Pro and then slicing them using glScissor, which was a bad idea because scissoring turned out to be very slow and unoptimized. But it worked. We got text in the 3D engine. I don't really remember where I got that approach from but very unlikely I came up with it. Most likely it was from GL tutorials.