Vice City has never been a straight copy of Miami. It is a copy of how Miami has been filmed, which is a meaningfully different thing, and understanding that distinction is the best available tool for predicting what GTA 6 actually does with Leonida.
Rockstar has confirmed a modern-day setting across six regions with Vice City at the centre. It has not commented on influences. Everything below is film and television history plus reasoned inference, and where we are guessing we say so.
1983: Scarface Writes the Template
Brian De Palma's Scarface is the load-bearing beam of the entire genre. Not because it was accurate, but because it fixed a set of images so hard that everything after it is either using them or reacting to them: the immigrant outsider, the mansion with the balustrade staircase, the pastel suits, the cocaine economy as social ladder, the ending where excess eats itself.
GTA: Vice City in 2002 was, in structure, a Scarface homage with a controller. Tommy Vercetti arrives with nothing, takes the drug trade, ends up in a mansion. The Vercetti Estate's layout was recognisably in dialogue with Tony Montana's.
GTA 6, by all appearances, is not doing this. Rockstar's published synopsis describes Jason and Lucia as people for whom "the deck is stacked against them," pulled into a conspiracy after an easy score goes wrong. That is a downward-pressure story, not an empire-building one. It is closer to a crime thriller than to a rise-and-fall.
1984 to 1990: Miami Vice Invents the Palette
Miami Vice did something Scarface did not: it made Miami look like a specific colour. Executive producer Michael Mann's famous production rule was reportedly a ban on earth tones. What came out the other side was the pastel-and-neon Miami that now functions as visual shorthand worldwide.
Here is the part most people get backwards. The famous pastel colouring of Miami Beach's Art Deco district is not original 1930s design. Those buildings were largely white and beige. The pastel palette was applied in the 1980s by designer Leonard Horowitz, as part of the preservation push that saved the district. Miami Vice then broadcast that new colour scheme to the world as if it were ancient.
So the chain runs: 1930s Streamline Moderne architecture, 1980s repaint, 1980s television, 2002 video game, 2026 video game. Rockstar's GTA VI site preloads fonts literally named "GTA Art Deco." We went deep on the architecture itself in our Art Deco design piece, and on the real district in Florida's real locations.
1995 to 2003: Bad Boys and the Modern Gloss
Michael Bay's Bad Boys films moved Miami from neon-noir to sun-blasted, high-saturation action. The camera stopped lurking and started circling. Helicopter shots over causeways, cars shot from six inches off the tarmac, everything gold at magic hour.
This matters for GTA 6 because the trailers are shot much closer to this register than to the eighties one. Trailer 2 in particular is full of hard daylight, water glare and aerial coverage of the coastline. If you are trying to guess the visual grammar of the Extended Look on August 27, this is the closer reference point.
2006: Cocaine Cowboys Kills the Romance
Billy Corben's documentary did the opposite of everything above. It laid out the actual 1970s and 1980s Miami drug economy: the money, the corpses, the way the cash reshaped the city's banking sector and skyline. The tone is not glamorous. It is procedural and grim.
There is a plausible argument, and it is only an argument, that GTA 6 sits closer to this than to Scarface. Two things support it. First, the trailers lean heavily on documentary-style textures: body-cam footage, phone video, local news framing, social media clips. Second, Netflix routed the Extended Look through Brandon Riegg, VP of Nonfiction Series, and Strauss Zelnick told Bloomberg it will feel like watching a Netflix show. A crime-documentary sensibility is doing real work in this marketing campaign.
2010s to Now: The Florida Man Era
The newest layer is not cinematic at all. It is the internet's Florida: viral arrest videos, absurd local news, the Florida Man genre as a national joke. Trailer 1 opens on exactly this register, and the whole first minute is arguably a compilation of it.
This is the single biggest tonal difference from 2002. Vice City satirised eighties film. GTA 6 appears to be satirising the modern attention economy, which is a target that did not exist when Tommy Vercetti arrived.
The Lineage at a Glance
| Source | Year | What it contributed | Visible in GTA 6? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scarface | 1983 | Rise-and-fall structure, mansion iconography | Less than in 2002, on current evidence |
| Miami Vice | 1984 | Pastel and neon palette, night-city grammar | Strongly, in the architecture and lighting |
| Bad Boys | 1995 | Sun-blasted action, aerial coastline coverage | Strongly, in Trailer 2's daylight |
| Cocaine Cowboys | 2006 | Documentary tone, economic realism | Plausibly, in the found-footage framing |
| Florida Man internet | 2010s | Absurdist local satire, viral video texture | Very strongly, from Trailer 1 onward |
What This Predicts About Leonida
Careful inference, clearly labelled as such. If Rockstar is drawing on documentary and internet Florida more than on eighties film, a few things follow.
The map's variety makes more sense. Six regions, from Vice City to the Keys to Grassrivers to Port Gellhorn to Ambrosia to Mount Kalaga, is a statewide portrait, not a city portrait. Cocaine Cowboys is a story about a state's economy; Scarface is a story about one man's house. GTA 6's geography, covered in our regions guide, is built for the former.
It also suggests the satire targets institutions rather than individuals. GTA V's best material was about corporations, media and therapy culture. A modern Leonida has obvious equivalents: retirement economics, hurricane insurance, tourism, cruise ports, real estate speculation. None of this is confirmed. Rockstar has described no mission content beyond the one-paragraph synopsis.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GTA 6 based on Scarface?
Not directly, and less so than the 2002 Vice City was. Rockstar has never named an influence. GTA 6's published synopsis describes two people pulled into a conspiracy rather than a rise-to-power story, which is structurally different from the Scarface template.
Is Vice City the same as Miami?
No. Vice City is a fictional city in the fictional state of Leonida, drawing on Miami's geography, architecture and media image. Real landmarks are reinterpreted rather than reproduced. We compared them directly in GTA 6 versus real Miami.
Why is Vice City always pastel?
Because Miami Vice broadcast a 1980s repainting of Miami Beach's 1930s Art Deco district to a global audience. The pastel scheme is a preservation-era design choice by Leonard Horowitz, not original 1930s colouring, and it has been the city's visual signature ever since.
Will GTA 6 be set in the 1980s?
No. Rockstar has confirmed a modern-day setting. Any eighties material would be historical texture within a present-day game, not the period itself.
The Bottom Line
Vice City is an argument with four decades of Miami media, and each GTA visit has argued with a different part of it. In 2002 the opponent was Scarface. In 2026 the evidence points at documentary crime reporting and the absurdist internet instead, with the pastel Deco palette retained as inherited scenery rather than as thesis. Whether that read holds up is a question the Extended Look answers on August 27, and it is the thing we will be watching for first.