(Image credit: Rockstar)

GTA 3’s original cover was axed after 9/11, and its artist disputes the story

14 Oct 2026, 13:43 by https://www.creativebloq.com/author/ian-dean · Creative Bloq

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Look at the cover for GTA 6, and you know what it is before you’ve even clocked the logo: all those little windows stuffed with characters, cars, and scraps of criminal life, mashed into a collage that’s been the series’ calling card for 25 years. It almost didn’t exist, though, because, according to Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, it was a rush job, a stand-in for the artwork originally planned for Grand Theft Auto 3, put together in the shadow of the September 11 attacks.

“The cover art that became the iconic GTA cover art; Stephen Bliss did that in about two evenings,” Houser says in a new interview with IGN, which is a bit mad when you think how long that look has stuck around.

None of this is brand new, mind, since Houser told much the same story back in 2011 when GTA 3 turned ten, but it’s a good one, and it’s doing the rounds again. The art that got binned looked like an old movie poster, with a blown-up bridge, police firing into the air, and helicopters, which felt too heavy for a game due in October 2001; with so little time left, Rockstar had to ditch it and start over.

Bliss tells it a bit differently, though. He has reportedly said he was given around a week to produce the replacement, and that the original cover had already taken roughly six months to paint and was being lined up for the Christmas 2001 release, which sits awkwardly next to the two-evenings line. (Read what Bliss did next in our interview, where he discusses the Fear City project.)

Rockstar continues to use the design template for every GTA release, including the upcoming GTA 6.(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

What came out of the scramble was a template Rockstar has been using ever since, a segmented layout that lets every new game fill the panels with its own cast and cars and locations while still looking like part of the family, which is why Vice City, San Andreas and now GTA 6 all feel like they came out of the same house. The logos have always had that family look too, to the point that fans still pick them apart every time a new one releases.