Colossal Media Confirms Hand-Painted GTA 6 Murals for Rockstar, 22 Years After GTA: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto VI has a massive work-in-progress mural in Brooklyn, New York, as part of its marketing campaign and the painter behind it is the same company that made Rockstar Games' first outdoor ad more than two decades ago. Colossal Media, the New York firm known for hand-painted billboards, has confirmed on Instagram that it is working on GTA 6 marketing, all the while sharing a 22-year partnership that runs back to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas way back in 2004.

The confirmation came from Colossal itself. "Twenty-two years ago, we painted our first campaign with our very first client, @rockstargames," the company wrote. "Two decades later, we're back at it for GTA 6. From Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004 to GTA 6 in 2026, tradition continues." The post carried the hashtag the firm built its name on, #alwayshandpaint, the tell that this is brush work on a wall rather than a printed vinyl wrap, a rarity in an ever-digital and AI-driven world.

Community sightings had already pegged Colossal as the team behind the large Jason and Lucia mural going up at Wythe Avenue and North 11th Street in Williamsburg, on the same corner that carried a Grand Theft Auto V mural in 2013, the post just confirms it.

Colossal says its first brand campaign of any kind was the 2004 GTA: San Andreas murals in New York, the job that helped launch a company now famous for reviving hand-painted outdoor advertising in a vinyl-and-digital age. It painted other Grand Theft Auto murals as the series got bigger and now it is back for the biggest launch yet. So the GTA 6 mural is not just another ad, but it is the same craft by the company's telling the same partnership that marked earlier Rockstar launches.

Given Rockstar's obsessive attention to detail and how it prefers to leave no stone unturned, it makes sense to work with a marketing partner that has never let them down over the years.

It also adds yet another layer to the story we covered with the Paris ad. The giant wrap going up on the Paris périphérique is a printed, industrial-scale billboard built to for drivers and pedestrians to read whenever they look up from a motorway. The Brooklyn piece is the opposite, a slow hand-painted mural on a single wall that's best appreciated up close and in person.

Rockstar is running both at once, which shows a campaign happy to mix a mass-produced blitz in one market with a bespoke, old-school flex in another. Add the near-million-dollar "Welcome to Vice City" sign in Miami into the mix and the picture is a studio reaching for every physical format it can in the final weeks.

So the Brooklyn mural is official now, the painter has put its hand up and the 22-year detail is the kind of thing Rockstar fans love.

The same shop that introduced New York to San Andreas in 2004 is painting Jason and Lucia onto a Williamsburg wall before GTA 6 arrives on November 19. Some traditions are worth keeping.