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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Look closely at any vehicle you steal and you'll notice every single one is running the same plate, VC R29. It's a little detail that carried over the series' habit from GTA III, where every car in Liberty City read LC R29 instead. Nobody in Vice City seems bothered by the obvious paperwork fraud.
Vice City is the odd one out in the whole 3D-era run of GTA games for not letting you carry an AK-47, a weapon that shows up in basically every other title including its own prequel, Vice City Stories. Digging through the game's files shows references to the gun that never made it into the final build, so it looks like it was planned and quietly dropped somewhere along the way.
Vice City wasn't originally meant to be its own game at all. After porting GTA III to PC, Rockstar started kicking around the idea of a mission pack that would bolt some new weapons, vehicles and missions onto Liberty City. The concept just kept growing until it made more sense as a standalone release, and that's how we ended up with an entirely new city instead of a glorified expansion pack.
Early on, the plan was to set the sequel in the real city of Miami and call it exactly that, GTA Miami. Somewhere along the way Rockstar decided a fictional stand-in gave them more freedom, so they built Vice City instead and pushed the timeline back to 1986, well before the events of GTA III.
Full production on Vice City reportedly only lasted around nine months, which is a genuinely wild timeline for a game of this scale even by today's standards, let alone 2002. The team leaned heavily on assets and tech already built for GTA III to hit that deadline, and it clearly paid off given how the game turned out.
Tommy Vercetti was a proper turning point for the series since he was the first GTA protagonist to actually talk, voiced by Goodfellas star Ray Liotta. Before that, series heroes like Claude in GTA III were completely silent, so giving the lead a real personality and a Hollywood name attached to it was a big deal at the time.
Recording sessions weren't always smooth sailing. Burt Reynolds, who plays wealthy businessman Avery Carrington, reportedly got so irritated by Dan Houser hanging around during his session that things nearly turned physical between the two of them. Reynolds ended up delivering a great performance anyway, but it says something that Rockstar mostly moved away from big-name actors after GTA IV.
Phil Cassidy, the one-armed gun nut voiced by Gary Busey, isn't just a one-off mission giver here, he's one of the more persistent faces across the whole 3D Universe, popping up again in later GTA titles set on the same timeline. For a guy who mostly just sells you weapons and blows things up, he's earned an oddly loyal following.
Vice City's waters actually have sharks patrolling underneath, though most people never clock them because the water's murky enough to hide the detail. They're far more visible in the original PS2 release than on later remasters, where the clearer water almost works against the secret. They don't attack you, they're just quietly there.
The Windows release accidentally ended up on shop shelves a full five days before its official street date, and once that got out plenty of other retailers just started selling their copies early too rather than sit on stock while customers next door were already playing. A logistics slip that basically fixed itself.
