A hand-painted Grand Theft Auto VI mural in Brooklyn, New York, has been tagged with graffiti less than a month after it was finished, and just over two weeks before the game comes out. The wall at the corner of Wythe Avenue and North 11th Street in Williamsburg shows Jason and Lucia, the game’s two leads, in the same artwork that Rockstar Games uses for its launch trailer.
Late on Tuesday night, according to reports, someone sprayed a large black-and-white “JELOUS” tag across the bottom of the piece. Photos of the tagged wall were then shared on Instagram by an account called jelous.ktd, and many GTA fans have not taken it well.
The tag runs across the lower half of the mural, over the legs of both characters and the front of the red car that Lucia is sitting on. The Grand Theft Auto logo, the faces of both characters and the Rockstar logo in the corner are all still visible. As of Friday, neither Rockstar nor Colossal Media, the New York company that painted the wall, had commented publicly on the damage. There has also been no report that the mural has been cleaned or repainted since the tag appeared.
Who painted the GTA 6 mural in Brooklyn?
The mural is the work of Colossal Media, a company that specialises in hand-painted outdoor advertising and is based nearby on North 10th Street. Colossal confirmed the job in an Instagram post on 3 October, saying it had painted its first ever campaign for Rockstar 22 years ago. “Two decades later, we’re back at it for GTA 6,” the company wrote, describing the jump from San Andreas in 2004 to GTA VI in 2026 as a tradition that continues. That post has since collected more than 200,000 likes on Instagram.
The corner itself has some Rockstar history, having carried a Grand Theft Auto V mural back in 2013, according to the fan site GTABoom. Colossal’s painters spent about seven days on the new piece, which was finished around 10 October after fans had tracked its progress through photos posted on Reddit. One freelance muralist, who said in Reddit comments that he was working on the wall for Colossal, described it as a temporary piece with a lifespan of around a month. TalkEsport has not been able to verify that account, and neither Rockstar nor Colossal has said how long the mural will stay up.
Why the Jelous tag angered GTA 6 fans and graffiti artists
The reaction online was quick, and most of it was hostile. Under the Instagram post showing the tag, commenters wrote “Ruined” and “Not cool”, according to Kotaku, even as the photo became one of the account’s most popular posts. TheGamer later reported that comments on the post had been switched off after the criticism kept coming. On the GTA subreddit, a user who said they were an Italian graffiti artist called it “pretty disrespectful, even by graffiti standards”.
Not everyone agreed, however, and the argument soon turned into a wider debate about what counts as fair game on a city wall. Some defended the tag on the grounds that the mural is a paid advertisement for a game that has already taken an estimated $750 million in pre-orders, rather than a community artwork. Others pointed out the obvious irony of a Grand Theft Auto billboard being defaced, since the series has always been built around breaking the rules. One Reddit commenter quoted by TheGamer said that tagging a mural for a crime game was almost poetic, but argued that posting a photo of it online undid the point.
The person behind the Instagram account has not commented beyond the posts themselves, which also showed the same name at several other spots around New York. Gadget Review noted that no independent source has confirmed who actually sprayed the wall in Williamsburg. Sony, whose “Plays Best on PS5” branding appears on the mural as part of its marketing deal with Rockstar, has not commented on the tag either.
Where the Brooklyn mural fits in Rockstar’s GTA 6 campaign
The Williamsburg wall is only one part of a physical marketing push that has spread across several countries in the final weeks before launch. In Miami, the city that inspired Vice City, Rockstar reportedly spent close to $1 million on a “Welcome to Vice City” sign at the Kaseya Center. It has also partnered with the Wynwood Walls museum, which says it now hosts new murals from artists featured in Grand Theft Auto VI. Near Paris, a giant banner on one of the Les Mercuriales towers removed the guns from the cover art, while the American murals kept them.
Street art runs through the game as well as its advertising. According to a feature published by Dazed in August, Rockstar brought in more than 50 real street artists to design murals for the Stockyard area of Vice City, which is modelled on Miami’s Wynwood district. Fans have been adding tributes of their own, too, with one pilot spending eight hours drawing GTA 6 in the sky over Arkansas. It is a campaign that has leaned heavily on hand-made art, both on screen and on real walls, which helps explain why the Brooklyn tag struck such a nerve with fans.
Grand Theft Auto VI launches on 19 November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, more than 13 years after Grand Theft Auto V first arrived. Rockstar’s pre-order announcement priced the Standard Edition at $79.99 and the Ultimate Edition at $99.99, and our GTA 6 release date guide has the full breakdown of editions and launch timing. The studio released its launch trailer on 15 October and added almost 40 new screenshots to its launch gallery on 5 November. Digital pre-loading begins on 10 November, according to Rockstar, nine days before the game unlocks.
