A highway sign in Trailer 2 names the airport, and two places nobody can explain

Grand Theft Auto 6's second trailer spends about a second and a half on a causeway heading into Vice City. Jason's driving, a pick-up ahead is towing a jet ski, an airliner crosses the sky, and above the lanes there are three overhead signs.

We pulled the frame out of Rockstar's own 2160p master and cropped it. The signs are completely legible, and between them they name the airport, two places nobody's explained, an interstate network and a US route.

What the signs actually say

None of that's our interpretation. It's what's printed on the signs.

The airport has a name now

Our own landmarks page had been saying, correctly, that Rockstar had confirmed an airport without ever naming one. There was an airport, just not one with a name.

That's changed. The left-hand sign reads VCI Airport, with the standard aircraft symbol beside it, signposted off US 35 North. VCI is the obvious contraction of Vice City International, which is how every real American city signs its main field, and it's the first time the airport's been given a name in official material.

We've updated the wiki to match. This is the whole reason we read frames and don't just wait for press releases.

Southside and Peacock Bay

The right-hand sign's the interesting one. Exit 3, SW 9th Ave, for Southside and Peacock Bay.

Neither name's turned up anywhere else. They aren't in the trailers' dialogue, they aren't in Rockstar's press copy, and they aren't among the district names read off shop signage. They exist because somebody at Rockstar built a road network coherent enough to need exit signs, and exit signs name places.

What they actually are is wide open. Southside reads like a broad area more than a single neighbourhood, the way Miami's own Southside is. Peacock Bay reads like waterfront, and Vice City has an awful lot of waterfront. We're not going to guess further than that.

The street name is its own small confirmation. SW 9th Ave follows Miami's quadrant grid, where every address hangs off a north-south and east-west axis and carries NW, NE, SW or SE. Rockstar's brought over Miami's addressing system along with the palm trees.

The road network has numbers

The centre sign carries two interstate shields, 97 and 397, with 397 sitting where a spur or a loop takes off from a parent route. Real interstate numbering works exactly that way: a three-digit route that starts with an odd digit is a spur, an even digit is a loop, and the last two digits name its parent.

The left-hand sign carries a US 35 shield, which is a different class of road entirely. So Leonida has at least an interstate, a spur off it and a US route, and that's a more detailed road hierarchy than any previous game in the series has bothered with.

And the airport exit's also the Ambrosia exit. Ambrosia is the interior industrial region, a long way inland. Signposting it from a causeway on the edge of Vice City tells you the two are connected by a road somebody's expected to drive.

What one frame can't tell you

A name on a sign doesn't mean it's a place you can visit. Grand Theft Auto V signposted places you could never reach, and an airport with a name isn't necessarily an airport with an interior.

It also doesn't tell you where any of this is. Exit 3 implies a junction three exits along something, but from which end, on which road, and in which direction, one frame can't establish.

What it does do is shift four names out of the unknown column: the airport is VCI, Southside and Peacock Bay exist, and the roads have numbers. For a game whose map Rockstar still hasn't published, we'll take it.

The frame itself is shot 9 of Trailer 2 in our frame browser, which carries all 88 shots of both trailers with a link back to the second each one was taken from. Go and check it yourself.