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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Thanks to some licensing headaches in the US, the German release of the game actually shipped with more radio tracks on it than the American version got. It's a strange little quirk of music rights that meant not every player was hearing quite the same soundtrack, depending on where they bought the game.
Fall in the water in Vice City and Tommy just sinks, no swimming animation, no rescue, just a quick death. Rockstar addressed it directly in an interview with PSM2 at the time, basically saying that programming proper swimming would have taken too long and that watching a hardened gangster paddle around wouldn't have looked especially cool anyway. Swimming didn't actually arrive in the series until San Andreas.
Lance Vance is voiced by Philip Michael Thomas, who spent the 80s playing Detective Ricardo Tubbs on Miami Vice, the exact show Vice City is riffing on wholesale. Thomas liked the role enough that he came back to voice Lance again years later in the prequel, Vice City Stories, so the connection clearly wasn't lost on him either.
Hunting down every one of the game's 100 hidden packages scattered across the map isn't just a completionist badge of honour, it actually unlocks a Rhino tank at Tommy's properties once you've found the lot. Considering how tucked away some of these packages are, that reward feels well and truly earned by the time you get there.
The name Vice City is doing double duty, it's obviously winking at Miami Vice, the neon cop show the whole aesthetic is lifted from, but it's also just a literal description of the place. A city built almost entirely on drugs, corruption and greed genuinely earns the word vice without needing the TV reference at all.
DJ Toni on Flash FM is the same Toni Cipriani who ran Flashback FM back in GTA III, just younger and considerably more naive this time round given Vice City's earlier timeline. A chunk of her on-air material even reuses jokes from her GTA III stint, including the bit about her having been on fire, which is a nice bit of continuity for anyone who remembers the earlier game.
Long before Fernando Martinez was running his euphemistically named prostitution ring, Fernando's New Beginnings, he actually got his start on the airwaves as a DJ on Emotion 98.3. He's already dropping hints of his future pimping ambitions between songs, which is a fun little breadcrumb for anyone who bothers listening closely to the in-game radio.
San Andreas launched just two years after Vice City, yet it packed in a map several times bigger, around 100 story missions, and a mountain of side content. For a Rockstar team working on that timeline, it's honestly kind of wild.
Lazlow Jones has voiced a radio personality in every mainline GTA game since the third entry and has been the series' chief writer for its radio content behind the scenes for just as long. GTA V finally gave him a physical, on-screen role too, one where the protagonists get to put him through some fairly humiliating situations for a change.
Half a million copies flew off shelves in the first 24 hours alone, and that climbed to 1.4 million within 48 hours, a record for any game at the time. For a sequel released barely a year after GTA III, that's a genuinely startling pace, and it's a big part of why Vice City ended up as the best-selling game of 2002 in the US.
