In his self-published autobiography, he states that he spent much of his childhood in the cottage country of the Ottawa Valley, an isolated environment that did not allow him to have traditional friendships or social activites, and thus spent much of his time learning computers and typography; he graduated from Sheridan College with a degree in classical animation, a field that was largely obsolete by the time he received his degree.
[1] Larabie was employed at Rockstar Canada and had contributed his designs to multiple video game titles, including the hit series' Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne, before he quit the company in 2002 to focus full-time on type design, after having released a series of freeware fonts over the Internet under the brand LarabieFonts since 1996.
[2] Larabie recalled an incident in which Rockstar had used his Pricedown font for the Grand Theft Auto logo, completely unaware that its designer was their own employee.
"[3] He noted that when he had previously attended typography conferences, he had received the cold shoulder from attendees who felt he was threatening their business.
[3] In another case, attorneys for Metallica sent Larabie a cease and desist order over one of his freeware fonts, Pastor of Muppets, for having taken letter designs from Metallica's wordmark; though Larabie maintained that, as Americans, they could not claim copyright over character designs as they did not meet a threshold of originality, he complied with the order (also noting that the use of the Muppets name could have drawn further trademark challenges), but found that the font had been too widely distributed to withdraw it from all the sites that had begun distributing it.