Vice City Then and Now: 2002, 2006 and Today

Why this comparison keeps getting made badly

“Vice City is back” has been the headline since December 2023, and it is doing a lot of unexamined work. The name is back. Whether the place is back — the same fictional city, the same continuity, the same map redrawn — is something Rockstar has never addressed, and the series has form for rebuilding rather than reusing.

This guide sets out what the earlier games actually were, accurately, and then what official material for the new one actually shows. Where we are interpreting rather than reporting, we say so.

Then: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, 2002

Released on 29 October 2002 for PlayStation 2, with Windows and Xbox versions following during 2003. Set in 1986. Its protagonist was Tommy Vercetti, voiced by Ray Liotta, whose casting anchored the game’s debt to American crime cinema of the period.

Mechanically it was the second game built on the engine and design language of Grand Theft Auto III, and it added things the series then kept: motorcycles, helicopters as a standard player tool, and a property and business ownership layer that gave the player a reason to accumulate rather than just spend.

Its city was built as two large islands connected by bridges, with an identifiable set of districts — a beach strip on one side, a downtown business core, residential and cultural neighbourhoods inland, a private island of mansions, and an airport. The tone was carried as much by its radio as by its missions: a period-accurate dial running from synth-pop to hard rock to Latin jazz, with talk radio doing the satire.

Our read. Vice City in 2002 was a pastiche. It was not trying to be Miami; it was trying to be the cultural memory of Miami as filtered through 1980s film and television, and it pursued that with real discipline. Almost everything people love about it follows from that single decision.

Then again: Vice City Stories, 2006

Released for PlayStation Portable on 31 October 2006, with a PlayStation 2 version in 2007. Set in 1984, two years before the original, with Victor Vance as protagonist — the brother of a character from the 2002 game.

It reused and adjusted the same city rather than building a new one, and its notable systems addition was an empire-building layer, in which the player captured and ran criminal sites across the map. It is a smaller game and a less celebrated one, but it matters to this comparison for one reason: it is the precedent for Rockstar returning to a city it had already built, and it shows Rockstar treating that city as something to modify rather than preserve.

Now: what official GTA 6 material actually shows

Here is the honest inventory, with no inference.

It is a state, not a city. Rockstar’s own framing places Vice City inside Leonida, with a conspiracy running across the state. The official site names six areas: Vice City itself plus the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia and Mount Kalaga. Nothing in the 2002 or 2006 games was structured that way. Our map covers the whole thing.

It is contemporary. Official footage shows smartphones, vertical social video, modern cars and modern signage. Rockstar has not stated an in-game year and we will not invent one, but the period-piece framing is gone.

It is two protagonists. Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, presented as a pair. Both earlier Vice City games had a single lead.

The city looks denser. Crowd and traffic density in official footage exceeds anything in the series’ history, and the beachfront in particular is shown as genuinely packed — see our beachfront strip entry for what is actually visible.

Some districts are named now. Rockstar’s own Vice City region copy names Ocean Beach, Little Cuba, the Tisha-Wocka flea market and the VC Port, and its edition and pre-order material adds further places — Washington Beach, Shore Drive, the Stockyard, Southside Vice City, the Ocean View Hotel — mostly without saying where they sit. Several of those names also existed in the 2002 game, and Rockstar has not commented on that overlap. Any district name beyond the official list is still somebody’s invention, and we do not use them.

What has not been said, and is worth not assuming

• Continuity. Rockstar has not said whether this Vice City is the same fictional city as the 2002 one, a reimagining, or simply a reuse of a good name.
• Returning characters. None announced. None.
• Map overlap. No statement that any geography from the older games is reproduced.
• Radio stations and DJs. Rockstar has announced GTA VI: The Album, including 34 original tracks and six singles available now. The album announcement does not by itself establish the game’s complete radio-station or DJ lineup.
• Any 1980s content at all, beyond the vintage-themed pre-order pack covered in our pre-order guide — which is cosmetic, and is nostalgia being sold rather than setting being established.

What actually carries over

Our read, offered as interpretation rather than fact: the through-line is not geography, it is method. Both the 2002 game and the new one build a fictional Florida out of the way the real place presents itself to the rest of the country. In 1986 that presentation came through film and television, so the game was cinematic pastiche. Today it comes through phone video and social feeds, and the official material’s most distinctive stylistic choice is exactly that — the state observed through clips people shot themselves.

That is the same joke told with a new instrument, and it is a far more interesting kind of return than a redrawn map would be.

Read next

For the real-world side of the comparison, see Leonida versus real-life Florida. For what the trailers actually establish, start with the Trailer 2 breakdown, and for everything confirmed about the world itself, the everything confirmed map guide is the fullest page on this site.