Returning to Vice City Put Me in the Perfect Mood for GTA 6

A huge reason why I’m dreading Grand Theft Auto 6 so much that I literally talked about it on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOxKS7HXa90″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>news is that we’re building up the sheer scope of the launch to an intimidating degree. Between the Netflix reveals, preorder details, arguments over physical media, and skyrocketing console prices, it all starts to feel so much bigger than just one video game.

But GTA 6 is, ultimately, just one video game. It’s important not to forget the fact that all of this hype only exists because we’re talking about the next entry in a long line of excellent video games. I wanted to reclaim some of this perspective, remember my excitement for GTA 6 the game, not just the media spectacle. So with a few weeks to go before launch, I reconnected with the franchise’s roots by revisiting Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. This pilgrimage worked like a charm, and playing this blast from the past has me even more pumped for the future.

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Return to Vice City for the History

2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City isn’t the first Grand Theft Auto game. The series originated as top-down murder simulators on the original PlayStation in 1997, where the ersatz Miami locale of Vice City first debuted. GTA: Vice City also isn’t the game that brought GTA into 3D. That honor belongs to the hugely innovative GTA III in 2001. 

But as a direct follow-up to GTA III, a watershed moment in game design and the birth of the modern open-world game, GTA: Vice City is still a landmark game in its own right. It’s the game I picked to represent the franchise as a whole in my gaming history book, Video Game of the Year, because it is where I argue GTA fully crystallized the identity we still see today. Vice City’s vision of what it wants to be is so clear and so well-executed that it’s remarkable how strong it remains when you go back to it.  

(Credit: Wren McDonald, Jordan Minor, Abrams Books)

Return to Vice City for the Vibes

For starters, isn’t it wild that Vice City’s main character, Tommy Vercetti, is voiced by none other than the late Ray Liotta? Today’s games chase Hollywood movies arguably to a fault, so the presence of major actors isn’t too surprising. But Rockstar was way ahead of the curve in manifesting their cinematic gangster aspirations by literally casting the Goodfella himself as the lead. It’s an incredible flex and the kind of touch that makes these games feel like they’re operating on a higher level. Like most Rockstar protagonists, Vercetti is a bit of a blank slate pushed around by the whims of the plot. But Liotta gives him a real point of view, offering players a crucial lens through which to experience what would otherwise be a jumble of barely related incidents.

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But Vice City is deeper than just stunt casting; it’s a world the game skilfully convinces you to buy into. Rockstar’s smartest choice here was making a 1980s period piece. The game is full of broader pop culture allusions, with Tommy’s drug-fueled rise to power dropping him into everything from Scarface to Miami Vice. But these feel like organic parts of the setting, not distracting and random references. It’s as appropriate a landscape for gangster melodrama as New York in the 30s or, later, Los Angeles in the 90s. 

Thanks to Liotta’s performance and the 80s vibes, Vice City has a specific sense of character and artistic coherency that even GTA III lacks. Everything is thought through. The streets are a nonstop neon nightmare, with pink flamingos and teal palm trees. The expertly curated soundtrack is loaded with every banger you want from salsa to synth. Gun down the police while listening to “Wow” by Kate Bush or Toto’s “Africa.” The entire aesthetic is bursting with love not for the actual decade, but for this particular hazy, sleazy pop-culture recollection of it. 

Playing Vice City now, that throwback feeling is only amplified because the fuzzy, almost hallucinogenic look of this classic PlayStation 2 game triggers its own fond memories of an earlier time. Vice City has an ageless style, with boxy low-polygon models to match the boxy vintage suit jackets. It reminds me of how I watched Happy Days’ 1970s take on the 1950s… in the 1990s. Revisiting GTA: Vice City, embracing its retro status, is nostalgia on top of nostalgia, albeit with a lot more violence.

Return to Vice City for the Gameplay

Crucially, all of this outer madness provides the context that supports the core reason Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is so successful: it’s an incredible game to simply play. Unlike so many of today’s modern open-world games, this isn’t a glossy diorama afraid of letting you go off the rails. This is an object meant to be played with, even broken if that’s what you desire. You’re meant to kick off random car chases until the pigs sic their helicopters on you, terrorize the streets with shotguns and chainsaws, and buy up nightclubs until your money is making money. The city of Vice is, first and foremost, a space where all of this is not only possible but also actively encouraged. 

Given their astronomical sales figures, these days Grand Theft Auto games get flak for being more popular than good, something for mainstream audiences without taste. And you can certainly criticize elements like the dumb attempts at offensive comedy or occasionally janky controls. But the artistry of a video game also comes from the interactions its design inspires. Through that lens, the craft on display in Rockstar’s work is undeniable, an exquisite canvas to paint crime onto.

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Vice City, an open-world game from 2002, has a genuine sense of place that even games today haven’t fully matched, despite vastly more advanced technology. The city feels like a city, not a glorified map where missions occur. Chunks of terrain aren’t copied and pasted for artificially increased scale, but rather, Vice City is dense with locales that are thoughtfully arranged. The mood changes as you travel from one neighborhood to the next. Chaotic missions like robbing a mansion or making a dramatic speedboat getaway on the beach exist right alongside whatever petty vandalism you want to commit on your own time. You’re fully transported to this sunny and care-free day on the beach, where the blue ocean quickly fills with red blood, because you are the author of that experience. GTA may simulate a life of crime, but simulating any kind of life remains a tremendous gaming feat.

Return to Vice City for the Future

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a genre-redefining game whose influence you still can’t help but see in the medium, even when you aren’t looking. After revisiting the game myself to prepare for GTA 6, I heard the hum of Vice City in the background of other, unrelated games I was playing. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a kid-friendly take on the Arkham games, but by taking place in a wacky open-world Gotham City, it’s a kid-friendly take on GTA, too. Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! is largely an homage to Crazy Taxi, but driving around the city like a lunatic, actively running down people and objects, is pure GTA carnage.   

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So, I’m very curious to see what GTA 6 has learned from its fake Floridian forebearer. We already know that this return to Vice City includes some 80s throwback costumes and an original vinyl soundtrack. But what about the deeper stuff? What kind of sense of place can Rockstar now pull off with old-school craft, new-school tools, and enough cash to make real drug lords jealous? From the footage we’ve seen, I’m already enamored with how GTA 6 seems committed to immersing players in the Miami of today, the Spanish nightlife of it all. But with the game also taking place in areas surrounding the city, what’ll be the balance between quality and quantity?

We’ll have to wait until November to find out, but even if GTA 6 is somehow a huge bust, I still appreciated this chance to replay a classic. You can also play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City right now if you want. The original may be tough to track down, but the remastered version is on all platforms and has been greatly improved since its infamous launch in 2021. See for yourself how nearly a quarter-century of gaming innovation is bookended by joyous road trips into Hell through the Sunshine state.

About Our Expert

Jordan Minor
Principal Writer, Software
Experience

My PCMag career began in 2013 as an intern. Now, I’m a senior writer, using the skills I acquired at Northwestern University to write about dating apps, meal kits, programming software, website builders, video streaming services, and video games. I was previously a senior editor at Geek.com and have written for The A.V. Club, Kotaku, and Paste Magazine. I’m the author of the gaming history book Video Game of the Year: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977, and the reason everything you know about Street Sharks is a lie.

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