The story of Rockstar's logo is a glimpse at the chaos of its early days
Rockstar's transformation from DMA Design—the Scottish developer behind the Lemming series as well as Grand Theft Auto—into an international publishing behemoth is a tale that's been told several times before. For starters, there's David Kushner's book Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, and BBC docudrama The Game Changers starring Daniel Radcliffe. There's even our own feature on how Rockstar made millions selling Scotland's natural export: dark comedy.
One story that hadn't been told in full is how the company's immediately recognizable logo with the R and star against a yellow background came to be. Until now, as Time Extension(opens in new tab) has tracked down former Rockstar designer Karen Scott (then Karen Mui), who explained how she and artist Jeremy Blake created the image that's become inseparable from the company.
At the time, Rockstar had a marketing plan that involved printing the logo on stickers and spreading them across New York, where it had just opened the new office Scott and Blake had been hired by. «It has to be a sticker and it has to have the glue you can't unpeel at all. Even if you tried,» were her instructions. «The kind that when you're a kid in the '70s once you put it on your bedframe, it never comes off.» That's why it has rounded edges—they made it harder to get a grip on if someone tried to peel it off.
The 1970s were an inspiration for the color as well, Scott said, explaining that «the gold or yellowish gold is actually something that kind of nods to the '70s almost like early Kodak logos and things that had that same kind of vibe that was very much part of early Rockabilly rock music.»
Though when she and Blake joined the company hadn't settled on its new name, the small,
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