1984 → 2026

Two years before Tommy Vercetti ever sets foot in the city, Vice City belongs to other people. Vice City Stories puts you behind Victor Vance, a soldier discharged from the army and pushed into the trade he spends the game trying to control — money he needs for his brother's medical bills, not for a penthouse.

The city's drug economy in this era runs through the Mendez cartel, and the game's arc is Victor building the criminal infrastructure from the ground up: the properties, the routes, the crews. It is a foundation story, and it is deliberately unglamorous compared to what follows.

The most important thing 1984 plants is a person. Ricardo Diaz appears here, years before he becomes the obstacle standing between Tommy Vercetti and the city — the same man, earlier, with less to lose.

Tommy Vercetti arrives in Vice City after fifteen years in prison, sent south by Sonny Forelli to run a deal that was never meant to work. The ambush that opens the game is the whole plot in miniature: Tommy is not in Vice City to build something, he is there because someone else decided he was expendable.

What he builds anyway is the version of Vice City that stuck in everyone's memory. The Vercetti Estate, the Malibu Club, the Print Works, Kaufman Cabs, Pole Position — an empire assembled property by property, until owning the city is a literal mechanic rather than a metaphor.

It ends on the roof of his own mansion, with Lance Vance on the wrong side of a betrayal and Sonny dead in the lobby. Tommy Vercetti finishes the game as the most powerful criminal Vice City has ever had, and the neon-and-pastel version of the city he presides over is the one Grand Theft Auto VI is being measured against forty years later.

Vice City reopens on November 19, 2026, this time as the centrepiece of the state of Leonida — a setting that reaches well past the city limits into the Keys, the wetlands, Port Gellhorn and Mount Kalaga National Park. The postcards Rockstar published for each of those places are the clearest statement so far that this is a state, not a city map with suburbs.

The leads are Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval. Lucia is the first female protagonist to headline a mainline Grand Theft Auto; Rockstar introduces her incarcerated, with her circumstances framed as much by bad luck and bad company as by her own choices. Jason grew up around people who made money the easy way, did time in the Army, and drifted back into the same orbit working for Brian Heder in the Keys.

Rockstar has been open about the shape of the story — two people whose loyalty to each other drives everything, in a Bonnie-and-Clyde framing the studio has used itself. What it has not confirmed is how any of it resolves: not the mission structure, not whether you switch between the two leads freely, and not the ending. Anything you have read about those is someone guessing.