Nightlife

In this game nightlife is more of a setting than a side activity. A big part of the Vice City story runs through venues: Boobie Ike owns a strip club and a recording studio, Dre'Quan Priest works the music side, Real Dimez perform, and Raymond's product supplies the club.

What's been shown

So far we've seen Lucia dancing in a club under purple light, a strip club interior with money in the air, and the Jack of Hearts frontage with its pink neon. The Jack of Hearts is Boobie Ike's strip club. There are bars in the Keys, including The Rusty Anchor. And there's Delight's Cabaret in Port Gellhorn, with a marquee advertising new girls, new food and a hiring notice.

That last sign is a very precise bit of writing. A venue advertising food and staff vacancies on the same sign is doing badly, and it tells you what Port Gellhorn's like without a single line of dialogue.

Game Informer's September screenshots added a biker bar, with neon, a pool table and club patches rendered one by one on the jackets. It's in our run through all twelve.

Two finds in the Extended Look

Inside the Jack of Hearts, in the Extended Look's nightlife section, there's a poster with a QR code for something called Peekhole. It reads as an OnlyFans parody, and the code leads to Rockstar's own GTA 6 site. PlayStation LifeStyle spotted it, Rockstar hasn't said what it is, and we wrote it up. It could be an app on your phone or just a poster.

About 24 minutes in there's a penthouse party, purple and blue lights and a host in a bow tie, and it's part of a job. Lucia texts Jason "GUYS EVERYWHERE" and then a run-down of what's waiting in the saferoom: "10+ guys, auto weps, explosives". We read the texts off the 4K master.

Edge's issue 430 cover feature, out on 29 October and written from a Rockstar demo, lists going to clubs among the ordinary things you can do between missions, next to buying beer in shops and taking the train for the day. That's reported.

Strip clubs, After Hours and Boobie Ike

Grand Theft Auto has had strip clubs since the 3D era, and nightclubs you can own as a business since the After Hours update to Grand Theft Auto Online, which turned a venue into an income stream with a warehouse under it.

Boobie Ike is introduced as somebody who turned a street reputation into a club and a studio, and Raymond supplies him. So the game looks like it's building that same structure into the story from the start, instead of bolting it on afterwards.

The music side

The music-industry plot has a real soundtrack around it now. Rockstar named the first six radio stations on 8 October, with hosts including Trick Daddy and Trina on Dirty South Classics, and Bad Bunny on Cocoteo FM, all rounded up here. On 29 October the Newswire announced Justice's Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score, out on 11 December, with a new single, "Pusher" featuring Gesaffelstein. That's our piece on the score, and the radio stations page has the full list.

What isn't known

We don't know whether you can walk into any venue whenever you like, whether dancing is a minigame or a cutscene, or whether clubs can be owned. Rockstar has shown the interiors and named the venues, but it hasn't described any of it as a system. We also don't know what Peekhole is, whose penthouse the party's in, or which station plays in which club.