Something I thought impossible just few years ago just became reality: Retro finally goes GMK and it’s ready to be purchased on Massdrop.

All started with DSA Retro. It was the first community organized group buy in DSA family. To tell all the truth Koreans had some DSA before us but it was limited to their market. DSA Retro was one of the most successful group buy of the time (we are talking 3-4 years ago). It was so popular in part because DSA was a novelty at the time, in part because we included a hell lot of options. It wasn’t so easy back then to cover less common or custom keyboards and Retro was basically compatible with all of them :)


Initially the idea was to actually run the set in SA family. In fact the color scheme was designed on the high profile set that came with the Commodore 64 (C64), a computer from the 80s, hence the name “Retro”. Unfortunately Signature Plastics was missing too many molds in the SA family, so we kept the color scheme but switched to the low profile DSA. To make it appealing to a wider audience (and not just retro junkies) we also added the burgundy modifiers and green ESC and arrows, that incidentally was the same color scheme of the One Per Desk PC, another computer from the 80s. We couldn’t be any more retro geek than that!

So years passed, Signature Plastics produced the missing molds for the SA family and it was finally time to release Retro the way it was meant to be. So we ran SA Retro with the PETSCII side printing like the old dearest C64.

PETSCII is a set of characters that were used to generate more complex graphics or user interfaces. They were the precursors of modern emojis in a way, but people became extremely creative with them and a sort of PETSCII Art movement started. On SA Retro they are merely cosmetics, though; they have absolutely no other reason to exist other than evoke that nostalgia feeling.


At that point to make the set complete we wanted to also run DCS Retro, but the set was not strong enough for an already feeble DCS family, so we dropped the idea. GMK was not very much community friendly and anyway the market wasn’t really ready… until now!

I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability GMK Retro! Go get them before it’s too late.