Shitzu Squalo

The Shitzu Squalo is the Ultimate Edition's boat. It's docked at Washington Beach with a crate of explosives on board. The PlayStation Store's Ultimate Edition list calls it a fishing boat with an explosives crate. Some edition write-ups call it a weapons crate, so the exact wording depends on where you read it.

Squalo's Italian for shark, and the name's been on Rockstar speedboats since the 2002 game.

Leonida's the first map that really needs boats

Grand Theft Auto's always had boats, and it's rarely needed them. Leonida changes that. The story starts in the Leonida Keys, where the water is the road and the smuggling economy runs on hulls. Grassrivers is wetland you can get through by boat, and Vice City has water on more than one side.

So a fast boat with explosives on it is a working vehicle in that geography. It's something you'll use, and it won't just sit at a marina looking nice.

There's a second reason it matters here, and it's got nothing to do with the water itself. The wanted system is built on witnesses, cameras and physical evidence, and open water's the one surface in the game with none of those on it. We don't know if Rockstar's modelled that. The geography invites it.

The water itself won't always be kind, either. Edge's 29 October cover feature, from a Rockstar demo, reports that wind and the shape of the land affect the water, so sheltered waterways stay calm and exposed water can rock a boat. Open sea in a storm should be a different trip from the Keys on a flat day.

The go-fast boat it's based on

Offshore powerboats are to Miami what muscle cars are to Los Angeles, and that link didn't come from styling.

The go-fast boat became the signature vessel of the Florida drug trade around the turn of the eighties for an unglamorous reason: it outran what the authorities had. Hulls built for offshore racing, made a few miles up the coast from the water they were used on, turned out to be very good at crossing open sea fast with something heavy aboard. The response eventually involved buying faster boats, and that's how you get an arms race in pleasure craft.

Then television did the rest, and the genre Vice City's always been part of reverse-engineered its whole look from that period. A white deck boat against a Miami skyline is one of about four images the whole thing's built on.

What the shots show

A white deck boat with a low windscreen and the Squalo name on the flank. The official set also shows it doing something legal: in one shot somebody's fishing off the back while a dolphin surfaces alongside. That fits the water sports and diving Rockstar's shown in the Keys.

The pairing's deliberate. The same boat gets photographed as a smuggling tool and as a fishing platform, which is roughly how the real ones were sold and exactly how the Keys economy has always worked.

Shitzu

Shitzu is Rockstar's Japanese manufacturer, better known in the series for motorcycles than for hulls. Putting the badge on a speedboat fits how the studio builds its brands. A maker covers a category the way a real one does, across vehicle types that share nothing but a badge and a design language.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't published any speed or handling detail. It hasn't said what the crate holds beyond explosives, whether it restocks, or whether other boats carry storage the same way. And it hasn't said whether the Squalo's available to anyone outside the Ultimate Edition.