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Argelia Long
GTA: Vice City is one of the most popular games in the GTA franchise, and a huge part of this was its explorable recreation of Miami. Rockstar recreated Miami Beach pretty perfectly in GTA: Vice City - albeit with the usual exaggerated flare the series is known for - through '80s music, yacht parties, clothing styles, and neon buildings that make the player feel as if they are right in the heart of the Floridian city in the 1980s.
A huge part of the '80s vibes stem from GTA: Vice City being heavily inspired by Miami Vice as well. Every other mission includes the player dealing with drugs or gangs in the city. Taking on the character of Tommy Vercetti, the player must retrieve the money from a drug deal that went bad. As Tommy begins building his empire and exploring Vice City, it is clear that Rockstar created the game to mimic Miami in every way.
The architecture in Vice City is almost identical to the buildings in Miami. The Colony Hotel in Miami, for instance, is remade in GTA: Vice City as the Colon Hotel. The Hotel's appearance is very similar to real-life Miami, identically matching with the blue neon sign. Although players can't enter the Hotel, it is nice to see familiar landmarks in the game. Another landmark in GTA: Vice City is the Cape Florida Lighthouse in Key Biscayne. Players can enter the lighthouse and can even find a rare item around the area.
The famous Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami makes an appearance in GTA: Vice City. Renamed as the Ducum Inn Hotel, the landmark can be found in the Vice Point area in the game. The Hotel's half-circle shape is identical to the real Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Players can't enter the Ducum Inn unless they are playing GTA: Vice City Stories, which is different from GTA: Vice City, with its own story and a different playable character. The Fontainebleau Hotel is one of the most historic buildings in Miami and was made famous through many movies and TV shows.
The map in GTA: Vice City comes to a point like the state of Florida and even has islands that resemble those in real-world Miami. Where North Bay Village and Normandy Shores golf course is in Miami, Vice City has a similar layout in the same location. The place called Little Haiti is in the game as it is also in the same place as it is in Miami. When in comparison, Miami and GTA: Vice City's maps are almost identical.
Another part of Vice City that fits Miami's real world is the characters' clothes. The majority of the clothes worn in Vice City include Hawaii-type button-down shirts or mafia-style outfits. The 1980s were a time for pastel suits, and they definitely flourish throughout the game. The majority of the women in the game wear swimsuits or dresses, and protagonist Tommy Vercetti can change clothes with many different outfits available in the game that fit the Miami lifestyle that was shown on-screen in the '80s.
Throughout GTA: Vice City's 20-hour campaign, players can interact with various nationalities common in Miami, completing various storylines for the Haitian and Cuban groups. The Cuban missions include Umberto Robina, voiced by Danny Trejo in GTA: Vice City, and while many of GTA: Vice City's characters can slip into caricatures to match the GTA series' tone, it's the wider representation of these cultures that helps to make Vice City seem so much like real-world Miami.
In GTA: Vice City, the music gives the game the '80s theme it is looking for. Being on a yacht while a Hall & Oates song plays in the background is an iconic moment. The era of music throughout the game is an excellent selection for the setting. Although some songs are missing from the GTA: Vice City radio in the Definitive Edition due to various licensing deals expiring, Rockstar picked suitable soundtracks to capture the Miami feel in the '80s as players explore the city.
GTA: Vice City captures the '80s lifestyle in Miami in exaggerated but often accurate ways through its clothing, neon architecture, and music hits, and overall, it does a great job making players feel like they are in the real-world Miami in the heart of the 1980s. Rockstar is looking to revisit the iconic Vice City location - and the wider state of Leonida - in Grand Theft Auto 6 in Fall 2025, and from what was shown in the anticipated sequel's trailer, this should better represent a modern version of Miami, much like how GTA 5 brought San Andreas out of the 90s and into the present day.
In the past I've lamented the death, or at least the falling out of fashion, of World War II games. Compared to the shooters of today, which bear only the slightest resemblance to the real world, when I play WW2 games, especially the early Medal of Honor titles, I get a real sense that I'm being educated, or that the developers are at least trying to be educational.
Albeit to a lesser extent, I feel the same way about The Getaway, Team Soho's open-world gangster effort from late 2002. The writing is preposterous rubbish, the kind of Mockney hokum even Guy Ritchie would arraign, and it plays very badly, with enemy cars smashing endlessly into you during the driving sections and sluggish controls turning each shootout into a caracole.
But The Getaway, even if it is in a marginal or tangential sense, has an adherence to real-life that I wish existed in more mainstream video games. The devil's in the details. The fact that, in The Getaway, I can drive down Barbican tunnel, or walk past a Royal Mail delivery van, or shoot up a warehouse filled with pallets of Foster's lager, lends even the game's most ludicrous conceits some gravitas.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is what happened. Where The Getaway tried to take contemporary crime games, and by extension mainstream video gaming, into a real-world aesthetic, Vice City plundered for inspiration TV shows and movies. Miami Vice, Scarface, and the music videos of Steve Barron were visual springboards for Vice City, and it formed a bricolage of other people's fantasies, a hyper unreality where you recognized everything not from real-life, but from media and entertainment.
And it's wacky. You can run over pedestrians in a golf cart, or don a hockey mask and go tearing around with a chainsaw. You can buzz around Vice City in a helicopter. You can shoot up a shopping mall. You can use a spotlight to project a giant pair of breasts against the side of a building. In the narrow, depressing, video game sense of the word, Vice City is fun. It's the progenitor for what we now understand as open-world games.
And it absolutely destroyed The Getaway. Despite launching late in October 2002, by NPD estimates Vice City became the best-selling game that year. It remained in the chart throughout 2003, outshining The Getaway even as it launched in two more territories, Japan and North America.
Whatever The Getaway was trying to evince in regards to world design got lost amidst GTA's monumental success. In the short term, Vice City was the "better" game, bigger, cooler, and more competently made, but nowadays it's The Getaway that feels like the real revolutionary. It took an approach to design that, to this day, belies what I'd expect from open-world games.
The game's plot is a fun ride, so far, with a bunch of mean Koreans and crooked cops coming into the picture. But one of my main in-game distractions has been Chinatown Wars' drug-dealing mini-game. Early on you get a taste of the money to be made by pushing narcotics, and while you rarely need to do so in order to keep the story going, the option to trade in uppers, downers, ecstasy, coke, and weed and more, is always available, with dealers spread across the city.
Having put a little time into my GTA drug empire, I thought I'd ask a flesh-and-blood dealer in London about how the game's simulation compares to the real thing. Naturally, they're remaining anonymous. And I don't think I can be arrested for selling acid that doesn't actually exist. Right?
VICE: Hello, Entirely Anonymous Drug Dealer. What sort of products would you say you typically trade in these days?
Entirely Anonymous Drug Dealer: Well, it's been a while, but I've been dabbling in dealing since uni. Back then it was mainly MDMA, and weed as well, and since then I've personally dealt mostly in amphetamines.
So I've been playing this old Grand Theft Auto, with its built-in drug-dealing game. Buy low and sell high, you know how it goes. My first deal was acid. Everything's in "bags" in the game, and I buy a bunch of these bags for $20 and sell each one for $25, making me five dollars of profit on each. Does that sound like a good deal to you?
If it's sold in bags, I'd say that'd be tabs, because otherwise it comes in a liquid. If it's a bag of tabs, and you're only making a 25 percent profit on each deal, I'd say that wasn't so great. On hallucinogens, you can expect better. I've sold TCB before, which is kind of like a hallucinogen mixed with an amphetamine, and you'd expect to make 50 percent profit on each deal there, as the drug's quite rare. Stuff like MDMA, coke, and pills, that's everywhere, so you make less of a profit on them.
If you could really multiply what you paid for a supply, on a deal, you would though, right?
It might be a risk worth taking. There have been times for me in the past where I've been able to double my money really quickly, and I've gone for it. But you do have to be so quick, and sell everything you have in one go. That's the way to make the bigger money.
In the game, you get different prices for your goods in different parts of Liberty City. Different neighborhoods have different demands. I'm guessing that's the same in London?
Yeah, definitely. There are regional splits when it comes to prices and the quality of the drugs. For example, the only people I know who sell good ketamine are in north London. I have some north London links for coke, but you'll get much better stuff south of the river. That's based on where most of the stuff is, and certain areas have reputations for a certain kind of drug. If you wanna get way better stuff, you're going to have to travel. You're always moving from place to place, from borough to borough, because different people will be running things in each place, and cutting their stuff their own ways. At the end of the day, there are always one or two big shipments that get cut, and cut, and cut by people, before it reaches you. If you're in the borough where the shipment is, you might get better stuff, stronger stuff. If you sell drugs that have been cut shit loads you might make a nice profit on them, but nobody's going to come back to you to buy again. Cut it less, you'll make less money, but you'll have that returning trade.