I released Troll Bait on December 14, 1999. The spark actually came from someone named Pierciful. Back in the late 1990s, he was developing a fantasy game called Graal Quest and suggested I create a medieval-style typeface to match that world. We discussed the idea briefly, and the concept stuck with me. The name Troll Bait itself came from a nickname for my coworker who was active in LARPing. It had the right mix of humor and dungeon-crawling grit, so it became the perfect title. I designed the font in Photoshop, building shield-like letterforms with rivets, adding shading for a dimensional look, and then auto-tracing the artwork into vector shapes. More than 25 years after that initial conversation, Pierciful is now (2026) in the process of resurrecting Graal Quest. Originally, Troll Bait was distributed with a free commercial desktop license. In August 2020, I released it into the public domain under CC0.