Ocean Beach

Ocean Beach is the strip. Art deco hotel fronts in pastel, white sand, palms, and the neon that every bit of Vice City marketing has leaned on for twenty-four years.

It's got the same name it had in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002, so it's one of the clearest links between the two games.

Ocean Drive and South Beach

The district is Miami Beach's Ocean Drive and the South Beach blocks around it. That stretch has one of the biggest concentrations of art deco architecture anywhere in the world, roughly eight hundred protected buildings, and most of them went up in the decade after a 1926 hurricane flattened what was there before.

The pastel isn't original. A lot of it was painted on from the late seventies onward as the district was restored, which is why the look reads as eighties even though the buildings are from the thirties. Vice City's always been nostalgic for a colour scheme that was a nostalgia project in the first place.

What Rockstar's shown so far

Beach scenes with lifeguard towers and crowds, hotel frontage, rooftop pool decks looking over the sand, and the nightlife that runs behind it all after dark. The official screenshot set spends more time here than anywhere else in the city, so you can tell what Rockstar thinks the postcard is.

Trailer 1's Ocean Drive shot has a vertical HOTEL DIXON sign and a blue BOARDWALK in neon, which we read off the 4K master, and a Grotti Cheetah on a CH33TAH plate in the same street. Game Informer's September screenshots added a crowded beach with a flag, loungers, a dog and birds. The launch trailer has Jason and Lucia jumping off a roof into a hotel pool together, though Rockstar hasn't said which hotel or which district.

Then there's the newest bit of gameplay anyone's seen, and it came from South Park. The episode that aired on 28 October has a short clip of Jason on the beach in third person, minimap up, hitting a man with a bag of dog poop. Rockstar's thanked in the credits, so the footage is real, and we wrote it up here. Coverage of the clip calls the sand Vice Beach. Rockstar hasn't published that as a district name, and we don't know if it's simply the beach that runs along Ocean Beach.

Edge's 29 October cover feature, written from a Rockstar demo, also reports that walking on the beach is one of the things that raises Jason and Lucia's relationship. So the beach isn't only scenery.

Rockstar's pre-order copy puts a Shore Court personal garage near Ocean Beach. That's the only storage spot the studio's tied to the district by name.

Where the tourists and the money meet

Every Grand Theft Auto city has a district that's there to be looked at, and it's usually where the game puts its money and its tourists in the same square mile. In a game with an evidence-based police system, a crowded beachfront's also the worst possible place to get recognised.

The real beach is getting the treatment too. Miami Beach voted 4 to 3 in September to negotiate Vice City branding on beach chairs and umbrellas, according to CBS News Miami, and in October a video of Vice City chairs, umbrellas and cabanas on a Miami beach went round TikTok. The man who filmed it says it got him fired.

What isn't known

We don't know the boundaries, which buildings you can go into, or whether the 2002 layout's been reused in any real way. Rockstar has confirmed the name and shown the district, but it hasn't mapped it. Until it does, the 2002 game tells you roughly where Ocean Beach sits and what it looks like, and nothing about its streets. We also don't know whether Vice Beach is a name Rockstar uses, whether Hotel Dixon is a place you can walk into, or where the launch trailer's pool is.

Related: Vice City, Vice City districts.