GTA 6 beach chairs got a Miami worker fired before they were even up

Graham Simmon, a young guy who was setting up GTA 6 beach ads in Miami Beach, says he was fired for filming the Vice City loungers, umbrellas and cabanas before they were unveiled. He told the story himself on TikTok and Kotaku picked it up: his own video barely got a thousand views, but other accounts reposted it and it went around the internet. Here's what he filmed, what he says happened next and how it all fits into Rockstar's Miami campaign.

What did Graham Simmon film on the beach?

The campaign gear, fresh off the truck. Simmon worked for the company installing the game-branded beach furniture, and one day he pulled out his phone while unboxing it: wooden loungers with blue or red canvas and “Vice City” written in pink, umbrellas with the palm-tree VI logo and matching cabanas.

He posted it on TikTok without a second thought. “A few days ago, I posted a video where I was unboxing chairs on the beach. All the chairs, umbrellas, cabanas,” he explains in a new video from October 20. “It had less than 1,000 views, and I was told to take them down.”

Trouble is, it was already too late. GTA fan accounts had downloaded it and were sharing it all over X, Instagram and TikTok: on October 18, for example, GTA 6 Countdown was spreading it with the headline that Rockstar was “taking over Miami Beach”.

Why was he fired?

According to him, because the company really didn't like seeing the video spread online. “So yeah, basically GTA 6 cost me my job,” he sums up in the clip:

What stands out is his attitude. Simmon says he was new and nobody had told him he couldn't film or share the gear, but he isn't playing the victim: in the video's description he writes that he gets it was “his fault”, that he's not “blaming the company” and that he just wanted to share a “funny story”.

Why are there Vice City beach chairs in Miami Beach?

They're part of the deal Miami Beach's city commission approved on September 10 by a 4–3 vote: up to $4 million to put Vice City branding, discreetly, on beach loungers and umbrellas from October 15 to December 31, according to Fortune. That's why the sand says “Vice City” or shows the VI, but Grand Theft Auto isn't written anywhere.

On October 14, journalist Joel Franco had already photographed the rolled-up umbrellas in South Beach, packed in a box on the sand: a worker told him they'd go up that weekend. So Simmon's video only beat the official rollout by a few days.

And that's not all Rockstar has dropped on the city: Vice City cars on the streets, a blimp and banner planes, a shoot that smells a lot like a live-action trailer and, on November 18, the Miami Heat playing as if they were from Vice City. With this much marketing loose around Miami, it would be weird if nobody filmed it.