Having just made it back to the streets of Liberty City after a long stretch inside, Tommy Vercetti is sent to Vice City by his old boss, Sonny Forelli. But all doesn't go smoothly apon his arrival in the glamorous, hedonistic metropolis of Vice City. Tommy is set up, and loses everything. Sonny wants his money back, but the biker gangs, Cuban gangsters, and corrupt politicians stand in his way. Most of Vice City seems to want Tommy dead. His only answer is to fight back, and take over Vice City himself.
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Vice City hadn't been the main setting of a GTA game since Vice City Stories launched on the PSP way back in 2006. GTA VI marks its first return as a flagship, current-gen location, rebuilt from scratch and looking nothing like the pastel-soaked PS2 era version longtime fans remember.
Giving Claude a voice would've meant motion-capturing dialogue at a scale that just wasn't practical back in 2001, so Rockstar kept him mute early on to save themselves the headache. It wasn't until Vice City came around that a talking protagonist was even considered.
Somewhere in Liberty City there's a billboard cheekily reading 'See you in Miami!' It's a straightforward tease for Vice City, dropped in well before anyone outside Rockstar knew where the next game was headed.
Rockstar's sense of humour is very literal sometimes. Down near the VCN building in Downtown there's a window you can jump through, and inside is a proper brown chocolate easter egg, sat on its own little pedestal like it's the most important artefact in the game. It does nothing. It's just there because the joke was too good to pass up.
There's a hidden poster you're not meant to see properly, tucked inside the Ammu-Nation in the northern part of the second island. Grab a rocket launcher, aim it at the right wall and the camera clips through, showing Ronald Reagan giving a thumbs up next to a bullet-riddled Mikhail Gorbachev. A weirdly specific bit of Cold War humour for a game about jet skis and mob bosses.
Dotted around the coastline are a couple of unlucky souls sitting on the seabed with their feet set in concrete blocks, the classic mob way of making someone disappear for good. One's off the coast near Washington Street, the other near Skumole Shack. Nobody in Vice City is filing a missing persons report about either of them.
Find the right building and you can climb up to a specific apartment that's just soaked in Scarface references, blood-stained bathroom, chainsaw and all. It's a straight nod to the film's infamous scene, and it's a little unsettling how much care went into recreating something so grim in a game that otherwise plays its violence for laughs.
Wander through Little Haiti and you'll find the Romero Family Funeral Home sitting right next to Romero Family Butchers, which is exactly as morbid as it sounds once you look closer. There's a tombstone in the funeral parlour window naming a real level designer from the team, and round the back there's an unmarked grave and a skeleton. The butchers next door has a box labelled human organs and an arm resting among the cuts of meat. Subtle it is not.
There's a mansion on Starfish Island with a swimming pool that looks completely normal from ground level. Get up high enough to look straight down on it though, and the pool's shape plus the rocks at the bottom form the unmistakable outline of a woman's torso in a bikini. Somebody on the art team clearly had fun with that one and knew most players would never bother checking from above.
Tommy's room at the Ocean View Hotel has a poster on the wall featuring Claude, the silent protagonist from GTA III, even though Claude himself didn't actually have a name yet at this point in the series and wouldn't be seen in Vice City itself since the story is set fifteen years earlier. A small tip of the hat from one game to the one that came after it.
