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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The DJ voicing Flash FM in Vice City later turns up again, older and noticeably more composed, as a radio host in Liberty City Stories. It's a nice bit of connective tissue across the timeline, showing a character's broadcasting career quietly continuing well past the events players actually see her in here.
Files found on the original PS2 disc reference Trashmaster missions, basically trash-collecting jobs where you'd haul garbage containers to a junkyard. They never made it into the finished game and instead resurfaced years later in Liberty City Stories, suggesting the idea was simply shelved rather than scrapped outright.
Finish the bomb-defusing chaos of Publicity Tour, Love Fist's final mission string, and the limo you spent the whole thing babysitting actually spawns permanently outside their recording studio afterward. It's a small but satisfying reward for anyone who stuck with the band through all three of their increasingly ridiculous errands.
The sleazy English music manager Kent Paul went through at least one major redesign during development, with unused files showing an entirely different character model than the one that shipped in the final game. Whatever that earlier version looked like, it never made it past internal builds.
Dig through the leftover text strings in the game's files and you'll find mentions of unused characters called Mr. Moffat and Mr. Black, tied to missions that never made it to the finished product. Mr. Black in particular seems to have been meant as a contact for a scrapped string of payphone assassination jobs.
Pastor Richards only shows up briefly at Ricardo Diaz's party in the finished game, but by most accounts he was originally written for a considerably larger role in the story. Whatever bigger plans existed for him got trimmed down to that one short appearance somewhere along the way.
An unused audio line has Mercedes Cortez ranting specifically about Love Fist's lead singer, dialogue that was likely meant to play right after the Love Juice mission wraps up. It never made the final cut, leaving her opinion of Jezz Torrent slightly less thoroughly documented than it could have been.
Vice City's PlayStation 2 exclusivity ran out just over a year after launch, and the game finally made its way to Xbox on the same day as GTA III, giving Microsoft's console owners a chance to catch up on both games at once rather than waiting for them separately.
Rockstar doubled down on scale as much as style for the sequel, building a map that's roughly twice as large as the one players explored in GTA III. More beaches, more islands, more rooftops to find hidden packages on, all without sacrificing the density that made Liberty City feel alive in the first place.
Vice City wasn't a standalone bet for Sony, it was the middle chapter of a three-game exclusivity package that also covered GTA III and San Andreas. Sony's own executives later admitted the whole arrangement was partly a nervous reaction to Microsoft's Xbox launching around the same time, and it ended up cementing all three as some of the best-selling PS2 games ever made.
