Vice City then and now: the 2002 game versus GTA 6

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City arrived on PlayStation 2 on 29 October 2002. It was set in 1986, took place across two islands, and followed Tommy Vercetti building a criminal empire after a drug deal went wrong. Its world drew openly on 1980s Miami, on Scarface and on Miami Vice¹.

Grand Theft Auto VI is a different proposition. Vice City is now one region inside a whole fictional state, Leonida, and it sits alongside the Keys, a wetland, a decayed coastal town, an industrial interior and a national park²³. The city is no longer the game; it is the largest part of it².

The era gap

1986 Vice City ran on neon, cocaine money and glam metal¹. Rockstar's 2026 description of the same city is contemporary: art deco hotels and white sand at Ocean Beach, Cuban bakeries, a flea market full of counterfeit goods and a cruise port². The Extended Look is full of smartphones, livestreams and social media feeds, none of which existed in the 1986 version⁴.

Rockstar itself flags the distance. Its Vice City description opens by saying we are a long way from the eighties, while still calling the place the sun and fun capital of America².

What actually carries over

Names, mostly. Ocean Beach is back, and Rockstar's own pre-order material shows Jason and Lucia standing outside the Ocean View Hotel, which was the player's first safehouse in the 2002 game³¹. The strongest link is a line in Rockstar's Ultimate Edition listing describing a pair of revolvers with Vice City stylings sourced from the Vercetti Estate, which is Tommy Vercetti's mansion³¹.

That reference is a genuine confirmation that GTA 6's Vice City acknowledges the 2002 game's history. It is not a confirmation that Tommy Vercetti appears, is alive, or is mentioned in the story³.

What does not carry over

The geography almost certainly does not. The 2002 city was two small islands built for PS2 hardware; GTA 6's Vice City is a modern open-world city in a much larger state, and Rockstar has published no map to compare against¹²³. Nor does the story: no character from the 2002 game has been confirmed to appear, and Rockstar has never described GTA 6 as a continuation of Tommy's story³.

The honest summary

GTA 6 reuses a name, a coastline and a handful of landmarks, and it winks at the older game through collectible items. Everything else is new: new characters, a new era, a new state around the city, and a world built on systems the PS2 game had no way to run¹²³⁴.

How the city has been rebuilt around systems

The 2002 game's Vice City was a backdrop with missions attached. The 2026 version is described by Rockstar as a set of distinct neighbourhoods with their own economies, from the hotels of Ocean Beach to the flea market stalls of Tisha-Wocka to the cruise traffic at VC Port². Preview reporting adds an enormous number of enterable interiors, shops and lobbies, which is the practical difference between a city you drive through and one you can go into⁴.

The population changed too. Where the PS2 game recycled a handful of pedestrian models, Rockstar's current footage shows dense crowds with varied ages, body types and behaviours, including people on mobility scooters and beachgoers doing distinctly unheroic things²⁴.

What nostalgia gets right and wrong

The 2002 game is remembered for its soundtrack, its colour palette and its voice cast, and GTA VI is clearly aware of all three: it uses period music in its marketing, keeps the pastel-and-neon look, and sells a pre-order pack explicitly built around flashing back to that era³. What it does not do is pretend to be the same game³.

The real district both versions are drawing on

Neither the 2002 game nor the 2026 one names Miami, but both lean on the same real place: the Art Deco Historic District in Miami Beach, a federally recognised district of 960 buildings, most raised between the Great Depression and the early 1940s, and still the largest concentration of Art Deco architecture anywhere in the world⁵. Rockstar's 2026 tagline for the region, "Everything in Excess," undercut by the line "We're a long way from the '80s," is the studio explicitly telling you it knows the two Vice Cities are drawing on the same well twenty-four years apart². What changed is the lens: 2002 photographed the district as a period piece, 2026 treats it as a living, present-day neighbourhood with its own economy of hotels and flea markets.

A third data point: how GTA 5 handled its own history

GTA VI is not the first Rockstar game to revisit old ground. The state of San Andreas and its city of Los Santos first appeared in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, a full console generation before Grand Theft Auto V rebuilt Los Santos from scratch on a new map in 2013, with new protagonists and no shared plot⁶⁷. That earlier rebuild is useful context because it shows the pattern is not new: Rockstar reuses a city's name and its rough identity while starting the geography and the story over completely, which is exactly what the Vercetti Estate reference and the Ocean View Hotel do here, without implying any plot connection⁶⁷.

What a side-by-side actually proves

Not very much, and that is worth saying plainly. A shared building, a shared district and a shared name are proof that Rockstar wants long-time players to feel recognition, not proof of a shared story. The honest way to read GTA VI's Vice City is as the same postcard redrawn for a different decade and a much larger frame, rather than as a sequel location¹²³.

The gap between reuses is also informative. Nine years separated San Andreas's Los Santos from GTA V's, and by GTA VI's release it will be roughly a quarter century since the first Vice City. Rockstar treats these as long-interval callbacks rather than a continuity to maintain year over year, which is one more reason to read the connections here as tribute rather than sequel-building⁶⁷.