The internet is a-chatter today with a trademark dispute between Remedy Entertainment and Take-Two Interactive over both companies’ use of the letter “R.” While Take-Two filed its disputes back in May, we’re all talking about it now, because it is very fun to laugh about.
Back in April, Remedy–the studio behind Max Payne, Control, and Alan Wake–changed its logo to an overlapping series of “R”s (for “Remedy,” I suppose), with the word “Remedy” underneath for good measure. This apparently troubled Take-Two, owner of GTA and Red Dead Redemption-maker Rockstar Games, which also has an “R” as a logo (for, one supposes, “Rockstar”), albeit with a little star at the end. The dispute is over whether someone might get confused between these two “R”s and not know which company made which games.
The oppositions are currently in a “cooling off period,” which RockPaperShotgun explains is a chance for the two companies to sort it out between themselves. While the logos might look a little similar–there are only so many variations of the letter “R” out there–you’d think Remedy’s use of the word “Remedy” would go a long way in clearing things up. As a lawyer who spoke with Kotaku notes, “Just because they both use the letter ‘R’ in their logo doesn’t inherently mean the average and reasonably informed consumer is going to be confused.”
In 2021, Take-Two filed a trademark claim against Hazelight Studios’ It Takes Two for… using the word “two,” I guess. At the time, Eurogamer noted that “US Patent Office records show Take-Two is behind filings to contest numerous names with connections to the words ‘rockstar,’ ‘social club,’ ‘mafia,’ ‘civilization,’ and more,” all of which are words that fall into Take-Two’s universe but which are, broadly speaking, very common words whose use across the English language is probably not controllable, not that that would stop a company with enough money for lawyers from trying.
The whole thing also calls to mind a 2012 beef between Bethesda and Mojang over the word “scrolls” (as in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls), which was eventually settled with Mojang being allowed to use “scrolls” as a game title but with Bethesda hanging on to the trademark. Mojang ultimately released a game called Scrolls, which it later renamed to Caller’s Bane, writing, “I'm sure there's a good reason for it. Perhaps we just didn't like the sound of ‘Scrolls.’
This is, ultimately, a minor beef between companies. But on the plus side, it’s given me the joy of fantasizing about Take-Two’s imagined mixup. Suppose you expected to get Remedy’s Grand Theft Auto 6, or Rockstar’s Alan Wake 2. You would be very disappointed in the driving in Control, but you could get a really good YouTube essay out of reading too much into Arthur Morgan’s journals in Red Dead Redemption 2. Remedy and Rockstar already have some overlap with the Max Payne series, so if you ask me they should just lean into it. Add some more “R”s to either logo and go to town, kids. The possibilities are endless.
