Grand Theft OUTFRONT: GTA VI and the Cultural Significance of Video Game Billboards

May 13, 2025

Have you seen the new trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI?

After its predecessor raked in $9.5 billion in revenue over twelve years (SOURCE: Take-Two), it would be little exaggeration to say that the next entry in the Rockstar Games franchise is the most highly anticipated video game of all time. The first GTA VI trailer, released in December 2023, set YouTube’s high-water mark as the most-viewed trailer of all time in just 13 hours with 93 million first-day views (SOURCE: Forbes). GTA trailer two shattered that record, with 475 million views on day one.

Here at Brand Central Station, we’re as excited for the game as anyone. Maybe more so, because if history is any indicator, you’ll likely see some of our real-life canvases represented in the game. In fact, you may have caught a fleeting glimpse already.

After all, GTA VI is set in Vice City, a satirical version of Miami, where our billboards, wallscapes, and transit media reach 98% of the region’s population each week (SOURCE: Geopath). And it wouldn’t be the first time that our inventory ended up in a GTA game. In fact, Grand Theft Auto V faithfully recreated quite a few of our Los Angeles wallscapes and billboards across Los Santos, the City of Angels’ fictional stand-in.


Take for example this one alongside “Eclipse Boulevard” in “West Vinewood.” It’s based on The Hills, a very real (and recently expanded) wallscape at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Doheny Road.


The game also immortalized The Sunset Turn and the unorthodox, portrait-oriented Sunrise above, which greet motorists driving west on Sunset from Hollywood.


(top right photograph by John Lopez, distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license)

The Beverly Center is also represented in the game – albeit before its $500 million 2018 renovation (and before we converted its canvases to digital).


But perhaps our favorite GTA OOH is this ad on the Hookah Palace in downtown Los Santos – which Angelenos will instantly recognize as the Hotel Figueroa. It’s home to our Downtown Trio wallscape, which – in a delightful bit of meta – once actually advertised the game it’s featured in! Upon GTA V’s release, Rockstar commissioned a hand-painted mural with each of the game’s main characters across the three towers of the historic hotel. Games in the Fallout and Final Fantasy franchises have also been advertised on the unmissable 125-foot-high, 105-foot-wide canvas.


All told, GTA V contains approximately 550 billboards, mostly bulletins and posters, some even with extensions and other embellishments. Someone at Rockstar clearly did their homework. But they didn’t just include our billboards because a fictionalized Los Angeles wouldn’t look right without them – but also because out of home advertising is a powerful device for storytelling, worldbuilding, and cultural commentary. Advertising offers a window into what people buy, and to paraphrase Brillat-Savarin, tell me what you buy, and I’ll tell you what you are. John Wills, Director of American Studies at the University of Kent, put it this way:

This in-game “billboard” American Dream is one consisting mostly of fast food and dieting, lawyers and realtors, credit and debt associations, coffee and donuts, plastic surgery, and reality television. Everything is “for sale” and eminently consumable… Billboards satirize the American way of life, both in its aspirations and its limitations.
Just as Grand Theft Auto uses OOH to make its world come alive, so too can an OUTFRONT campaign bring your brand to life and tell your story. Interested? Let's play.

Author: Jay Fenster, Marketing Manager @ OUTFRONT

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