Get to know Stephen Bliss, the artist behind GTA’s most iconic visuals

When thinking of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar’s blockbuster video game series, what immediately comes to mind is the sprawling city sandboxes, the cinematic and satirical storytelling, carjackings and chaos-filled crime sprees. For those who grew up in the PS2 era, though, thinking of GTA likely also conjures the work of Stephen Bliss, who, for over 15 years, was behind the artwork for what is now one of the biggest franchises in video game history. 

Bliss began working with Rockstar while they were making GTA III. Samuel Houser, the company’s co-founder and current president, approached him with a brief to create a James Bond-style collage for the game’s cover art. “It’s a white background with a collage of flames and guns and everything,” he says over Zoom from New York, where he currently lives. “That took six months to paint. Then when 9/11 happened, we had a new brief for the American cover, which was to get rid of all the violence. So, I chopped out the buildings on fire, chopped out the guns and the car on fire. That’s when I came up with the grid system. I chopped out all the nonviolent images from that cover and put them into boxes.” 

Bliss’ journey to working on GTA was an unconventional one. Born in Scotland, he grew up in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge. After attending art school in Brighton, he emigrated to Japan in the 1980s, where he worked as a model. “I was only supposed to be there for two months to do fashion shows,” he recalls, “but I loved it so much that I stayed for four years.” 

During this time, Bliss took his portfolio of art from college to a meeting with Japanese fashion designer Nobuhiko Kitamura. “We had the same cultural references,” Bliss says. “Things like 60s and 70s pop culture. Hippie and punk culture. Mythology and Andy Warhol.” The pair began collaborating on designs. At the time, Bliss was drawing from sources such as bondage and drag culture, as well as New Romantic bands like Adam and the Ants. “If I painted a picture, Nobu would make a repeat pattern of it for fabric or a pair of socks. It was very open.” 

Bliss later returned to the UK, where he worked on comic strips for Sega, illustrations for Nintendo and on commissions with record labels such as BMG. One of his most notable commissions at that time was for Massive Attack’s No Protection dub remix album. The artwork is urban, grimy and industrial, pulling from everything from comic books to pop art, both huge influences on Bliss. It’s this cover that caught Rockstar’s attention. “Until Rockstar came along, video games were seen as for kids,” Bliss says. “I was fortunate that my work fitted into that world.” 

Grand Theft Auto III was arguably the biggest project Bliss had worked on up to that point, and he remembers seeing whole streets covered in posters of his artwork when the game was released in 2001. “Very few artists continually see their artwork plastered up around a city, or on billboards and murals and buses and magazine covers,” he says. 

Bliss worked on every Grand Theft Auto project up to and including GTA IV. He also worked with Rockstar on Red Dead Redemption, Bully and 2005’s oft-forgotten beat ’em up The Warriors, which was based on the 1979 film. Instead of working on the fifth instalment of GTA, however, he was tasked with setting up the company’s lifestyle department. “I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted that fit Rockstar’s vibe,” says Bliss, who used the opportunity to create posters, artwork and other merchandise.

Still, in 2016, Bliss left Rockstar. “I wanted to create my own IP and do fine art,” he says. He worked on murals, including one of Debbie Harry at Art Basel in Miami. He also began experimenting with urban palimpsests, taking thousands of close-up photographs of ripped posters and graffiti he saw on the street. “They look like abstract paintings,” says Bliss, who went on to deliver a TEDx talk about the pictures and the illustrations he subsequently began painting onto the palimpsests: “I would use that realistic cartoon style and paint things like gangs of female bikers, American diners, and all my Americana influences.” 

He also developed Fear City, a series of NFTs that later became a comic. Bliss speaks about his foray into blockchain technology unfavourably. “There’s a lot of bad players trying to fuck people over and steal from you,” he says. “The reality of being immersed in that is it can make you really neurotic, thinking that every email you get is a scam.” 

He also developed a meme coin called Looby, which also failed to catch on. “I was in a depression for about two years because I believed I was going to ascend to heaven or something,” he says. “That didn’t happen.” What Bliss is grateful for, though, is the two IPs he created during that time. “It rekindled my love of drawing. I wasn’t aspiring to be high art. It was just pure drawing with silly jokes, and that was a lot of fun because I felt like a kid again.” 

He has plans for both Fear City and Looby, including adapting the latter into a comic book series. He’s also working on a book about his time in Japan and designing monsters for a book by Usborne. Meanwhile, when it comes to Grand Theft Auto, he’s excited for GTA VI. “I really loved seeing that they’re still using the grid system and I love the artwork,” he says of Rockstar’s upcoming game. “I’m still aspiring to do something equally important in my own work,” he adds, “and maybe that might be futile. But in moments when I feel like I’m not successful enough or that I should be making it in the galleries, when I get 25 kids a day telling me that they love my work on GTA and that it moves them, I love it.”

Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on 19 November 2026. Read Dazed’s deep dive into the upcoming game from our Autumn Issue here.