Players found a second painting in GTA 5 resembling a GTA 6 map
Take-Two Interactive boss Strauss Zelnick promised that the GTA 6 marketing campaign would kick off this summer and wouldn't follow the usual playbook. Summer is almost over, and barely any official material has shown up. Players have decided the campaign is already running – it just looks different than expected.
The trigger was the Kortz Center Heist update, released July 14 for GTA Online. The heist revolves around swapping real paintings for forgeries made in the art studio of the player mansion, with the studio itself costing 4,700,000 in-game dollars.
The update added 27 new paintings for the trophy room, the entrance, and the basement level, with the basement piece, titled La Dernière Débauche, only awarded to players who kept all the other 26.
The first discovery was a piece called The Final Vice. The landscape at the center of the canvas matched the outline of Leonida from fan-made map reconstructions, while foliage painted blue reads as water surrounding Vice City, including the Leonida Keys and Port Gellhorn. A third tree on the canvas gets interpreted as a local lake.
After that, players started digging through every painting in the game. A new find turned up in a building near a tall plant. The canvas shows a large green patch at the center surrounded by several smaller dark areas, which, when flipped 180 degrees, forms a shape close to the fan-made map reconstruction.
The breakdown in the discussion got even more detailed. The suggestion is to zoom in on the image, crop it, rotate it roughly 200 degrees, and mirror it, framed as a logical step since the painting hangs on a wall. With that set of operations, the Leonida Keys appear at the bottom, along with the Grassrivers district and the outline of Vice City surrounded by water.
The map reconstruction itself was pieced together by fans from screenshots, footage, and every known bit of information. Nobody can verify how accurate it actually is, so a match with the painting only really proves that two unconfirmed images look similar.
Other finds in the same update look like a mixed bag:
paintings linked to Jason and Lucia, the main characters of GTA 6
a t-shirt with the Vice City logo
a necklace identical to the one worn by Cal Hampton
references to GTA IV, San Andreas, and Red Dead Redemption 2, including the Ludendorff church from North Yankton
Compared to earlier theories, this one looks downright tame. Previously, people tried to calculate the trailer release date based on the position of celestial bodies and clothing items, while an ordinary rat got picked apart as a key omen for the story.
GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series.
