Vice City

The city the game is named after, and the one Rockstar photographs most: twelve official screenshots, from a beach in daylight to a lit tower under an orange-rimmed sky to a club floor under stage light.

What Rockstar says about Vice City

Rockstar’s page for the city carries a three-word banner, Everything in Excess, and one line of positioning: it is a long way from the ’80s, but Vice City is still the sun and fun capital of America. The longer description calls it the glamour, hustle and greed of America in a single city, and then does something the screenshots do not: it names neighbourhoods.

Four of them. Ocean Beach, with pastel art deco hotels and white sand. Little Cuba, with its panaderías. The Tisha-Wocka flea market, with its bootleg brands. And VC Port, which the page calls the cruise ship capital of the world. Set against the twelve frames on this page, one of the four fits what they show: Rockstar’s pastel art deco hotels and white sand match the neon strip and the public beach, though none of the twelve names the district, and in the frames we have the only place the name itself appears is the motorway board at 13:06. Little Cuba, the flea market and the port are not identifiable in any of the official images we have yet, so they have no page here until they are.

The names are the useful part. They mean the city is divided into named districts in Rockstar’s own material, whatever the in-game map ends up calling them. The list of Ultimate Edition items on the product page adds a few more: Washington Beach for the Squalo, Stockyard for two of the shops, and Southside Vice City for the gang compound behind the PTT Youngin$ Illegal Goods Store.

Source: Rockstar Games, rockstargames.com/VI, page for Vice City, retrieved 25 September 2026.

Named places in Vice City

Every place below has its own page, and every one of them is put in the city by official material: it shares a frame with the city itself, or the city’s name is on it. Places that only have the skyline in the background are not listed.

• Ocean Drive. The neon hotel strip at night, with cars nose-in at the kerb and a crowd in the road; VICEBEACH POLICE on the patrol car.
• Ocean View Hotel. Large pink neon over the street at night, with a police officer in the foreground, in one of the city’s own frames.
• Dominion Hotel. An art deco frontage with the name spelled across the top, on the Ocean Drive promenade.
• Hotel Valetta. An art deco waterfront hotel with its name in two lines on a panel at the top of the facade, visible in the daylight overview.
• Megamundo. A lit tower on the bay with its name across the base, under dark cloud with an orange horizon.
• Sahara Arena. A lit events venue with a Mavericks banner beside the entrance, picked out in the night overview.
• Vice City Arts Center. A modern cultural complex lit at night, sharing a plaza with The Sumerian.
• The Sumerian. A named concert hall in the same plaza as the arts centre.
• The Vice City sign. Giant letters against a pink-lit sky with a business jet low overhead. Rockstar’s own caption: a jet flying over a sign that says Vice City.
• The income tax office. A small storefront tax preparer in a street of murals, in one of the city’s own frames.
• Jack of Hearts. The club photographed three times with Boobie Ike, whom Rockstar’s site calls a local Vice City legend.

What the frames show

The twelve cover the city rather than a corner of it. A daylight overview with basketball courts, low white buildings, a hotel on a waterway and the skyline behind. A crowded public beach with a lifeguard tower and a quad on the sand. Ocean Drive at night, neon along the hotel strip, a police car with VICEBEACH POLICE on the boot and a crowd around it. Two curved residential towers on a spit of land with speedboats in the bay. A night overview with a Ferris wheel, the Sahara Arena and the Vice City Arts Center picked out in light. A lit tower on the bay under dark cloud and an orange horizon, with MEGAMUNDO at its foot and a helicopter above. A balcony over a garden pool with the beach beyond it. A street under a painted viaduct with dirt bikes, a lifted blue saloon and a billboard.

Three of the twelve are interiors or close-ups rather than views: a club stage with cash in the air, two men in the street shot from a foot away, a man with a gold AK and a phone. The city is a place where things happen as much as it is a skyline.

One of the twelve is the sign. Giant letters spelling VICE CITY stand against a pink-lit sky with a business jet flying low over them, and that image has its own page here because the sign is a landmark in its own right.

The one thing the images make unmistakable is scale and variety. Art deco on the beachfront strip, glass towers, a mural-painted underpass, speedboats cutting wakes across the bay and a garden pool behind a hotel are all photographed as parts of the same city. What they do not show is the rest of the state: the stilt houses belong to Grassrivers and the motels to Port Gellhorn.

The Extended Look puts one of Rockstar’s own neighbourhood names on a sign in the game. At 13:06 a gantry carries two green boards, both read on the true pixel grid. The left one says Shorefront Ave over Washington Beach, EXIT ONLY with an arrow up and to the left, under a panel reading 404 ENDS with the number in a shield. The right one says Seaview Blvd over Ocean Beach, EXIT ONLY with an arrow straight down, under a tab reading EXIT 21A. Ocean Beach is the art deco strip in Rockstar’s own description of the city. Washington Beach is not among the four neighbourhoods Rockstar’s page for the city names, though its product page uses the name once, for the Ultimate Edition’s Squalo, docked at Washington Beach; according to the GTA Wiki it was a district of Vice City Beach in the 2002 Vice City and in Vice City Stories.

How to recognise it

• Twelve official screenshots, the most of any location
• Art deco hotel strip, glass towers, painted underpasses and a public beach in the same set
• VICEBEACH POLICE lettering on a patrol car
• A Ferris wheel, the Sahara Arena and the Vice City Arts Center visible in the night overview
• The VICE CITY sign, with a jet passing over it
• Motorway boards at 13:06 of the Extended Look reading Shorefront Ave / Washington Beach and Seaview Blvd / Ocean Beach

The frame it comes from

The frame is a still from the official Press pack, which carries no timecode. It is 3840 by 2160, and the subject occupies 3840 by 2160 of it. Also in it: Hotel Valetta, a building named Firefly Plaza, and a white transit bus.

How this was measured

These figures come from the dataset, not from the prose above. We measure everything and claim what counts. How we work

What we still do not know

• The map’s actual extent, and how much of it is city
• Which of the photographed buildings are enterable
• Whether the other neighbourhood names Rockstar uses appear on in-game signs, as Ocean Beach does on a motorway board at 13:06. In Trailer 2 at 0:34.60 a gantry of three boards carries destinations whose lettering sits under this site’s floor for reading, so what they say is recorded as our own reading on that sighting and is not printed here as read.
• How Vice City connects to the rest of Leonida
• Whether the destinations on those motorway boards are neighbourhoods, and whether any of them is one of Rockstar’s four