Now You Can Get Prince's Love Symbol as a Font

In 1993, Prince made the decision to swap his name for a newly created symbol. Eventually known as the "love symbol," the moniker caused confusion among journalists trying to cover the musician. At first, it was unclear how to pronounce the symbol or how to type it. Writers who wanted to use the symbol—instead of referring to him as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince"—were forced to install a text file with the symbol on their computers. Warner Brothers, Prince's record label, had to frantically mail out floppy disks with the font en masse. This particular file was seemingly lost to history, until Mike Wehner of The Daily Dot uncovered it in an unlikely place.

Wehner found the coveted file while playing the 1994 video game Prince Interactive, a point-and-click adventure game that follows Prince as he explores his Paisley Park Studios recording complex. Along with artwork and puzzles, the game included unreleased tracks and an interview with Prince. Today, Prince Interactive is unplayable without an emulator, but Wehner stumbled across something important in the game's files: Within a folder titled "FONTS," he found a font file called "PrncTrue."

The file is in an obsolete Font Suitcase file format, but luckily, Wehner did the heavy lifting for us. Using a converter, the intrepid writer managed to extract a TrueType Font file from the Suitcase file, which can be downloaded on both Macs and PCs. Best of all, The Daily Dot is letting us all download it for free.

You can read the whole story and get the download link here. Once downloaded, you can create the Love Symbol by typing a capital "S."

[h/t The Daily Dot]