For most open-world enthusiasts, few moments rival those first tentative steps into a new and unexplored sandbox. Everything is fresh, unknown and ripe for discovery as we ponder eschewing arbitrary map icons in favour of checking out far-off landmarks simply because we can.
GTA 6 will deliver this experience for the vast majority of nomadic crime-sim enjoyers when we finally get the chance to visit new-age Vice City for the first time this May—at least on consoles. But for one community within Grand Theft Auto fandom, those groundbreaking strides will be, all going to plan, defined by familiarity.
Launched on September 19, 2022, the Mapping Vice City thread, housed on GTAForums, has spent the last almost-three years speculating and hypothesising on what the GTA 6 map will look like, and which real-world locations will be reworked and reinterpreted to fit the game’s pseudo slant on Miami, Florida.
Using everything from crude speculation to educated guesses, and meticulous comparisons between in-game sites and real-world spots via Google Maps, Google Earth, Google StreetView, Bing Maps and Wikipedia, the Mapping Vice City community has spent over 10,500 posts (350+ pages and counting) plotting where Lucia and Jason’s incoming odyssey will unfold.
Every angle of GTA 6’s two trailers has been pulled apart, as have official screenshots, and, of course, the unfortunate litany of leaks that surfaced a few years back. To that latter end, the community takes a hardline stance against posting anything directly from the leaks, however it’s safe to say the information there has helped inform various lines of investigation in the interim.
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If you have time, the Mapping Vice City thread is worth checking out in its entirety (be wary of spoilers, obviously)—watching theories rise, fall and/or stick in real time is fascinating. And while each thread of hard-nosed triangulated forensic analysis is compelling, I’m here for the less rigid, less orthodox conjecture, such as one user who posits the amount of clouds present in the sky could be tied to map-gating, in the same way pre-GTA 5 games annexed parts of their maps by way of closed bridges.
Contributor Pudgehodge says: “I noticed that the northern area of the map almost always has these large/dense cloud formations. Do you think Rockstar might use clouds/weather as a map ‘boundary’ system? These cloud formations seem to be perpetually sitting in the distance in the north, and most shots that are actually in the more northern regions seem to be veiled in dense fog, mist and clouds.”
Pudgehodge suggests that flying into these areas could mess with air traffic, forcing players to turn around, but qualifies the whole thing by admitting they may be overthinking. Whether this turns out to be the case or not is a different conversation, but it underlines the spirit of the community. Nothing is off the table, and everything is peer-reviewed before making it into more formally agreed upon locations.
And personally? I love it. I love the fact that most of us, myself included, will spend the first few hours of GTA 6 combing its thoroughfares, exploring its tourists traps, climbing its knife-edge mountains, and whatever else grabs our attention totally blind; while in the meantime there’s a whole community who’ll dedicate themselves to hitting up landmarks with a smug smile, safe in the knowledge their pre-game homework was absolutely spot on.