Vice City districts

Vice City's about twice the size of Los Santos, so it's a city you'll learn district by district. Several of those districts have names now, and the names came from two very different places.

Port VC and Downtown come off the centre panel of the same Trailer 2 gantry that names Southside and Peacock Bay. We read every panel at 4K, and the full sign reads I-97 to I-397 North for Port VC and Downtown, with Exit 3 for SW 9th Ave, Southside and Peacock Bay.

Why the last two columns matter

A name somebody read off a shop sign and a name Rockstar wrote into its own marketing copy are different tiers of information, and this site keeps them apart. The press-copy names turned up almost by accident. Nobody publishes a district list, but somebody has to tell you where your bonus car's parked.

Watson Bay got a second mention in October. Edge's issue 430 cover feature, written from a Rockstar demo, says the team set themselves a challenge of getting to Watson Bay using only the game's public transport, which Edge reports is a working bus and train network. That's reported, and it's the first sign the district's somewhere you can actually travel to.

Vice Beach

You'll see Vice Beach used for the beach in newer coverage, including the write-ups of South Park's GTA 6 clip and a couple of our own captions. We haven't seen it in Rockstar's press copy or on a sign as a district name, so it isn't in the table. For now it's what people call the sand, and Ocean Beach is the district name with history behind it.

The 2002 question

Ocean Beach and Washington Beach were both districts in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City back in 2002. In that game Ocean Beach was the south end of the barrier island and Washington Beach sat just north of it. Both names coming back is a strong sign Rockstar's reusing the old district geography. A brand new city that just happened to share the name wouldn't need them.

Don't take that too far, though. Forty in-universe years have passed, the city's been rebuilt around modern money, and a name coming back doesn't mean the layout came back with it.

What the real city suggests

Miami splits up cleanly and Rockstar has followed it: a barrier island with the beach and the nightlife on it, a downtown of towers across the water, a working port, wealthy waterfront residential fingers, and neighbourhoods just inland with none of that money in them.

Footage shows a barrio neighbourhood with Cuban-American visual cues that would line up with Little Havana. The name hasn't been confirmed, and we won't print it as if it had.

The Extended Look also has a run-down strip mall, the one Lucia robs about eighteen minutes in. It's got Zeke's Gadgets, a dying video shop called Video Forever and a pawn shop and jewellers signed Casa de Empeño and Joyería Empeños, all of which we read off the 4K master. The Spanish signage fits the same inland, working neighbourhoods, but nothing places the mall in a named district.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't published a district map or a complete list. We don't know the boundaries, how many districts there are, or whether the named places are neighbourhoods or bigger zones. We don't know which district the Extended Look strip mall sits in, or whether Port VC is the same place as the container port in the trailers, though that's the obvious reading.

Southside and Peacock Bay are still the thinnest names. They come from an overhead sign in Trailer 2 and don't turn up anywhere else at all, which we wrote up in full. Still, a place with a road sign and nothing else behind it is still a place.