Vice City Port

A working shipping port sits on the Vice City waterfront, with container stacks, gantry cranes, rows of warehouses and the industrial bridges that link them up. It shows up in both official trailers.

Why every GTA map has a port

Ports do three jobs at once in these games. They're where things arrive, so they're the natural setting for a job about a shipment. They're huge flat spaces full of hard cover, which makes them good places for a fight. And they look like work, which balances out a map that otherwise leans toward beaches and nightclubs.

Grand Theft Auto V's Port of Los Santos and Grand Theft Auto IV's docks both did exactly that job.

PortMiami

PortMiami is one of the biggest cruise ports in the world and a big container terminal too, sitting on a man-made island right across the water from downtown. That geography's unusual, and it's handy for a game. The industrial estate is one bridge away from the towers and the nightlife, so it isn't pushed out to the edge of the city where nobody goes.

Historically it's also one of the main reasons Miami became a centre of smuggling. Volume is cover. A port moving that many containers can't inspect all of them.

The real port has turned up in the marketing talk as well. Rockstar's reported pitch to Miami-Dade over the summer included PortMiami installations themed on Port Gellhorn, and in October commission chairman Anthony Rodriguez brought an item that would let the mayor negotiate a bigger deal potentially covering PortMiami. Both are reported, and neither says anything about the game's port.

Port VC

There's one name on the record. An overhead gantry in Trailer 2 sends traffic on I-97 to I-397 North for Port VC and Downtown, which we read off the 4K master and wrote up with the rest of the highway signs. It's a road sign destination, so it tells you there's a place called Port VC that's big enough to signpost. It's very likely the container port, but Rockstar hasn't shown the two together.

How it fits the story

The game already has a smuggling economy running through the Keys on small boats, and a drug production and distribution chain in the city through Raymond and Boobie Ike's club. A container port is the same business at a third, much bigger scale, the one that carries weight instead of parcels.

Rockstar hasn't connected them on the record. The geography does it for them.

What isn't known

We don't know whether the port's somewhere you can go and play or just part of the skyline, or whether it features in the story. We also don't know for certain what it's called in-universe. Vice City Port is just the descriptive name people have been using for it. Port VC is the only official name in the frame so far, and it's on a road sign, so we're not swapping the page title until Rockstar ties that name to the docks.