GTA VI: Why Vice City Was Never Really Miami

In 2002, when Rockstar cast the voice of Lance Vance in Grand Theft Auto : Vice City, it did not pick just any actor: it chose Philip Michael Thomas, also known as Ricardo Tubbs in Miami Vice (1984-1989, the series created by Anthony Yerkovich and driven by Michael Mann). That casting choice was no subtle nod. It was a statement of intent, a clear indication of how Rockstar would build its world. Vice City does not try to simulate Miami; it constructs a city out of what film and television have said about Miami. With GTA VI just weeks away from release, that lineage is more than an exercise in nostalgia: it outlines the real limits and ambitions of Leonida, Rockstar's new fictional state.

The 2002 casting choice as a founding act

Casting Philip Michael Thomas as Lance Vance was no incidental decision. The actor embodies the television imagery associated with Miami in the 1980s: pastel suits, a white Ferrari and drug trafficking shot like a music video. Rockstar is not simply asking Thomas to play a new character. It is asking him to reprise a cultural role already established in players' minds. This much is confirmed by the game's own credits: Vice City draws on instant recognition of an actor associated with a genre, rather than with a real place. The voice brings an entire set of associations into the game before the player has even had time to explore the city.

The same logic of casting as a signal appears elsewhere in the game, from a soundtrack tuned to the FM radio hits of the 1980s to the art direction of its video game version of Ocean Drive. Nothing there is taken directly from the real Miami; everything is reconstructed from an image of the city that pop culture has already filtered. The result is a setting that feels familiar not because players have necessarily been there, but because they have seen versions of it on their screens.

Miami Vice, Scarface, Spring Breakers: three layers of fiction

Miami Vice is not the only source. Scarface (1983, Brian De Palma) gave Vice City its visual language of violence and criminal luxury, complete with a mansion, a staircase and unabashed excess. Later, Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine) would add another layer to the imagery surrounding Vice City: spring break fueled by MDMA, garish neon and American youth filmed like an acid trip. Three films, three decades, three distinct aesthetic approaches, yet one shared obsession: putting an imagined Florida on screen rather than documenting the real one.

One detail sums it all up: the Miami Vice series was filmed largely in California, not Florida. Vice City is therefore a fiction built on another fiction, itself shot somewhere other than the place where it claims to be set, with the whole thing imagined in the Scottish offices of Rockstar North. Each stage adds another layer between the game and the actual city. That hall of mirrors is not a production accident or an incidental quirk: it is part of the franchise's fundamental language.

What this approach suggests for Leonida

GTA VI follows the same pattern, and that is already a defining feature of how the game is being marketed. Leonida is not presented as an exact replica of contemporary Florida, but as a digest of what the state has come to represent in the recent American popular imagination. TikTok, true crime, influencers, viral news stories: the GTA VI trailer has already shown that Rockstar is less interested in reporting than in a constant stream of references to the digital culture of the 2020s.

Following the logic of 2002, it is reasonable to anticipate that Leonida will not simulate the real Florida. Instead, it will likely reinterpret the state through material already filtered by social media and recent pop culture. That is a cautious reading, not a certainty. Rockstar has never publicly detailed its research methods, and no official production document confirms the parallel. Still, Vice City provides a solid framework for interpreting the aesthetic choices already visible in the trailers and for understanding where those choices might lead.

The risk of a city that references more than it invents

This approach has a downside. A game that leans too heavily on recognizable references can end up feeling like a compilation of nods and winks rather than a place that exists on its own terms. Vice City avoided that trap in 2002 because its chosen reference points, Miami Vice and Scarface, were sufficiently dated to work as a deliberate, almost retro backdrop. They set the tone without competing with the game's own identity, giving players a familiar frame without making the city feel like nothing more than a collection of borrowed images.

For GTA VI, the risk is different. The references it draws on, including social media culture and the look of recent viral content, are contemporary at the time of release. A game that too faithfully quotes the cultural moment in which it was made risks aging quickly. Worse, it may leave the impression that it is commenting on the world rather than telling a story. That is a real limitation of the exercise, not a guarantee of failure. Rockstar has had ten years of development to calibrate those references, but the balance remains a delicate one.

Continuity rather than a break

One fact remains hard to dispute: Vice City's strength has never been its geographical accuracy, but its ability to recombine familiar images into something playable and coherent. Casting Philip Michael Thomas in 2002 was not a gimmick designed to cash in on nostalgia. It was a strategy built around immediate recognition, one that has worked for more than twenty years without ever being contradicted by the game itself.

GTA VI is not breaking with that approach; it is updating it for a different era. Whether Leonida resembles the real Florida matters less than whether it resembles the idea of Florida that players have already formed through the screens they use every day. It is a bet consistent with the history of the franchise, but it is not without risk: the more a work of fiction references its own time, the more exposed it becomes to the signs that its time has passed.