The leaked videos showing early development of the forthcoming setting GTA 6 in present-day Vice City a mistake - without the 1980s, Vice City becomes just another sprawling southern town with wide streets, white buildings, and palm trees.
None of that bodes well for a future Grand Theft Auto 6 set in the Vice City of today. Fans may be disappointed to find themselves dressed in cargo shorts rather than a wide-lapeled leisure suit, cruising the oceanfront boulevards while streaming Ariana Grande (sans entertaining commercials) rather than listening to Human League or Run-DMC on their car’s FM radio. The original Vice City was designed with Miami Vice’s Crockett and Tubbs and Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in mind - their white suits, speedboats, and cocaine lifestyles inspiring the overall feel of the earlier games, and one can rightly fear a Vice City based instead on the drab, 21st-century (sub)urban sameness of CSI: Miami or The Real Housewives of Miami.
Though to some extent the leak revealed GTA 6's story, gameplay, and setting, it wasn’t inevitable that Grand Theft Auto would return to its old stomping grounds of Vice City. But that has been Rockstar’s tendency with the franchise: Liberty City, San Andreas, and Vice City all appeared in the first Grand Theft Auto game in 1997, and each of them has been featured as the principal setting in many of its subsequent iterations. But Rockstar’s development team has had nearly ten years since the series’ last release to come up with other possible settings, and players frustrated by the return to Vice City’s well-trodden terrain can only fantasize about what other cities - both foreign and domestic - might have provided a better setting for Grand Theft Auto 6.
A Return to San Andreas Would Have Been An Option
One possibility for the next entry in the franchise would have been to return to San Andreas, a potential GTA 6 setting like Vice City featured most notably in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Longtime players are, of course, as familiar with San Andreas as they are with Vice City. Nevertheless, San Andreas is inherently a more interesting game locale, less dependent on its time period than Vice City is.
The state of San Andreas encomes three major cities - each of them quite different from the others - and a diversity of small towns spread across forest and desert zones. Gameplay in Grand Theft Auto 6 is rumored to go beyond the confines of Vice City itself, but the geographical diversity of south Florida is far less intriguing than that of the American west. That suggests that a return to San Andreas might have presented players with more interesting areas and encounters than what they will find in another visit to Vice City.
Going Back To London Would Have Been Fun For Grand Theft Auto 6
Another possible setting for Rockstar's GTA 6 besides Vice City is London. The capital of the UK was the location for a 1999 expansion to 1997’s original game called Grand Theft Auto Mission Pack #1: London 1969. This was followed not long after by Grand Theft Auto Mission Pack #2: London 1961. Both games were short and not made widely available (the first was published for PlayStation and PC, the second for PC only), but they were both set in the city of London during the decade of the 1960s. This was the era of the Beatles and the Stones, of shaggy haircuts and Austin Powers-esque attire, inviting a host of options for a GTA game set in that time and place.
Comparable to the 1980s in having characteristic styles and sounds, 1960s London would have been a fascinating time and era to re-visit. It would allow GTA 6 players to discover new weapons, combat, vehicles, and even crimes to commit; cocaine, a driving force for the action in GTA: Vice City, had yet to become popular in the 60s. It is difficult to imagine a game powered by trafficking of marijuana and hallucinogens instead of coke, but the possibilities are intriguing, and the narrow, ancient streets and alleys of London would have made an exciting contrast to the familiar streets players will once again navigate in Vice City.
Project Americas Likely Remains Unrealized in GTA 6
Long rumored to be the code name for the GTA game, “Project Americas” refers to Rockstar’s intentions to spread the action of its new game across multiple locations in North and South America, including but not limited to Vice City. Apparently, these ambitions were scaled back, with the forthcoming game said to have a more limited focus on Vice City itself, but rumors of a GTA 6/Project Americas whet players' appetites for a game featuring play set in sites across the continent. It would have been fun, for example, to explore the crumbling contours of Havana, Cuba, where players would have been able to drive classic cars - “Yank Tanks,” as locals sometimes call the ’57 Chevys and ’58 Dodges that still populate that city’s streets - perhaps during the era of Fidel Castro, when tensions with the United States were at their peak. Or, if a story centered around cocaine trafficking was desired, developers might have set part of GTA 6 in Medellin, Colombia, in the 1980s, which would have allowed them to explore similar themes to GTA: Vice City but in a totally different locale and with a different kind of enemy in Pablo Escobar.
There is, literally, a world of possibilities in which to set GTA 6 gameplay and realize Vice City's promise. One can only imagine how entertaining it would be to compete with Al Capone for control of bootlegging in 1920s Chicago, or to square off against a version of “El Chapo” Guzman in 1990s Mexico City. But none of that, apparently, is to be, and fans will have to content themselves with a Grand Theft Auto 6 that revisits Vice City, hoping that Rockstar will find a way to bring that familiar city to life without relying on the trappings of the 1980s.
