Rockstar Games worked hard to make the world of Grand Theft Auto 5 as realistic as possible. Advances in technology since the release of GTA San Andreas allowed the team to represent Los Angeles and the surrounding area in great detail and accuracy.
While walking through the virtual streets of Los Santos may not be the same as visiting LA in person, it’s a close experience. Rockstar paid a lot of attention to detail when recreating the city, but some adjustments had to be made.
The size of the city was made much smaller, the street layout was simplified, and landmarks were rearranged to fit into a more compact space, while still staying close to their original locations. The shape of the city was also altered, and the surrounding areas were removed, leaving only Los Santos instead of the larger Los Angeles area.
Even with these changes, the final result is still very accurate, possibly the most realistic in-game representation of a real place. Almost every building in the game exists or existed in real life and is located in roughly the same spot, even if its function is different.
This attention to detail isn’t limited to just the famous landmarks. Rockstar could have only focused on placing the popular tourist sites in the correct spots and finished the job, like many other games have done. But they put in extra effort. It’s likely that creating the map and all the visual assets took up a large portion of the development time compared to similar tasks in other games.
Even small, everyday places got attention, not just the big, famous spots. For instance, Lester’s warehouse is based on an actual warehouse in real life and looks exactly the same.
Los Santos International Airport
At the opposite end of the map, where the airport is located, we see that the developers decided to leave out a strangely shaped part of the city that technically belongs to Los Angeles. This thin area connects the main part of LA to the Terminal Island area, passing through Torrance and Compton.
In GTA 5, LSIA (Los Santos International Airport) is the southernmost part of the city, while in real life, LAX is more in the middle section of Los Angeles if we consider administrative growth.
The buildings in the game are similar to their real-life counterparts, but the layout of the airport in the game is quite different. The pseudo-courtyard design you see when driving up to it is mostly the same, but the runways and other buildings have been moved around a lot.
While a regular traveler in an airport may not get a good sense of how the entire place is laid out, since many areas are only for employees, players can explore LSIA much more freely in GTA Online. So, the changes in the layout may have been needed for security reasons.
Galileo Observatory
Flying back to the area near where the Vinewood sign is, we arrive at one of the most beautiful spots in GTA 5 — the Galileo Observatory.
It’s not just that the observatory itself is scenic — though the building and the park around it are nice — but the view, with the whole city spread out below you, is amazing.
The observatory is almost identical to the Griffith Observatory in real-life LA. Both the building and the park surrounding it are very detailed and accurate in the game, and the view is just as impressive.
Galileo Observatory (GTA V)It’s not just regular stores and homes either — Rockstar made sure that random warehouses also looked realistic, were in the right spot, and even had names that were similar. The Southwestern Bag Co. warehouse in LA is perfectly replicated in the game as the Los Santos Bag Co. warehouse on Popular Street.
It’s clear that the world of GTA 5 was created with a lot of care and attention to detail. This careful work goes beyond just Los Santos, as the entire game map includes many references to real places in California. If you live there, you’ve probably spotted some of these, and any GTA 5 fan visiting will likely have some surprising moments of recognition.
Vinewood Sign
When most people, especially those from other countries, hear “Los Angeles,” the first thing that comes to mind is the famous Hollywood sign.
It’s the one feature of the city that many people who have never been there automatically think of, and it’s the one thing that locals might wish people would forget, because there are so many other great things the city could be known for.
That massive sign on the side of Mount Lee has been recreated in GTA 5 as the Vinewood sign, placed on the renamed Vinewood hills.
Its location in the game is a bit different from the actual city’s layout. In real life, the northern part of Los Angeles stretches upward, and the southern half of the city reaches below it to the east. In the game, however, the sign is placed at the far north-east corner of the city, which is more on the edge.
Even with the change in position, the arrangement of the letters, with a slight wave, is perfectly accurate.
City Sights
The game also features less famous, but still unique, parts of the Los Angeles skyline in Los Santos.
These buildings are big and tower over everything around them. They usually have names, and while tourists may not pay much attention to them, locals would probably recognize them.
One example is the round tower of the Capitol Records Building, which in the game is represented as the Badger Communications Building in Vinewood, Los Santos.
Rockstar also focused on smaller, but still iconic, landmarks in the city. They got all the most famous skyscrapers, of course, and included almost every named tower in LA that fit within the smaller size of the map.
City Sights (GTA V)They even included the tiny Korean Pavilion near Olympic Blvd. in the game. The small, traditional building looks out of place among the large concrete and glass buildings.
The attention to detail isn’t only obvious with the famous landmarks, but also with everyday buildings you might walk by in Los Angeles without noticing. These buildings appear in Los Santos too, showing how much care Rockstar put into the game.
Even less noticeable places in GTA 5, like the 1966 Digestive Co. building, likely have real-world counterparts. This one is based on the Biscuit Company Lofts in LA. Another example is the Strawberry Avenue pawn shop, which in real life is a dentist’s office, but the building looks exactly the same.