This Week In Retro: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Patreon)

October 27, 2002: Rockstar releases That '80s Game

by Diamond Feit

Considering the amount of visible affection for the 1980s we now see in films, video games, fashion, and just about everything nowadays, back when the actual decade came to an end, everyone collectively looked at that ten year period with laughter and derision. Hair metal, shoulder pads, and the colors pink and turquoise were out, while grunge, backwards baseball caps, and black were in. By 1993, Don Johnson's once-iconic Miami Vice outfits looked as ridiculous as John Travolta's white suit in Saturday Night Fever.

This attitude of looking down on the past was just as common in the world of video games as it was in any other medium, as advertisers worked overtime to convince us that the games we had enjoyed just four years earlier had become hopelessly obsolete. Nintendo may have produced brand-new NES games until the mid-90s, but by the time I graduated high school, every teenager I knew had long since moved on to the 16-bit generation in order to play Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat at home. Sega ran ads treating Mario, easily the biggest icon in gaming at the time, as a relic of the past; why would anyone play a game starring an overalls-clad plumber when you could control a hyperactive hedgehog?

Speaking of attitude, no game reflected the changing of tastes better than Grand Theft Auto III. Debuting in 2001 on the PlayStation 2, the game offered players a fully three-dimensional urban playground to explore called Liberty City. The name couldn't have been more appropriate, as the open-world game promised players the freedom to do whatever they wanted. You could head to the next glowing circle and progress the main story, but you could also moonlight as a taxi driver, steal a police car to become a vigilante, race a sports car on the train tracks, or just mug pedestrians for the contents of their pockets.

Even though Grand Theft Auto III launched barely a month after September 11, 2001, players could freely kill cops and civilians alike, and even if they opted to refrain from extra-curricular felonies, completing the main story required committing countless violent crimes. The controversial nature and intoxicating gameplay of GTAIII combined to garner the title substantial amounts of press attention—and not just from dedicated video game publications. With millions of copies sold by early 2002, a sequel was inevitable.

Yet the announcement of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City included a number of surprises. First, the game would hit store shelves by year's end, an incredible turnaround given the size and scope of the project. Second, the game would not follow in GTAIII's footsteps but instead serve as a prequel, with the entirety of the story taking place in 1986. Not only that, but the eponymous Vice City, a stand-in for Miami, would replace Liberty City as the setting.

Yet when Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 20 years ago this week, the biggest surprise turned out to be that the team had outdone themselves. Vice City outshines GTAIII in every department, making the landmark title feel like yesterday’s news and proving that the open-world crime simulator was here to stay.

Objectively speaking, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City closely mirrors the formula established by its predecessor, presenting players with a satirical interpretation of an American city spread across three islands. Both games initially prohibit players from visiting other islands, forcing them to learn how to navigate the starting area before attempting to expand their turf. Both games follow the same narrative flow as well; after an initial crisis, the player has one contact from whom they can receive missions in order to advance the story, and they unlock a hideout where they can save the game. Everything else, from side-quests to mini-games to random collectibles, lie scattered around the map, waiting to be discovered.

Yet Vice City shakes things up from the start by giving the player character actual character. GTAIII starred a blank slate of a man, a literal no-name punk who never speaks and only gets involved in the story via sheer coincidence. Vice City stars Tommy Vercetti, a gangster fresh out of prison who needs to get out of town for a spell. His bosses send him to Vice City both to keep him out of their hair and also to let him shoulder the responsibility of drumming up business via the local drug trade—a source of revenue the mafia frowns upon but cannot ignore. Esteemed actor Ray Liotta voices Tommy and while it's hardly the most complex role of his career, Ray plays the part with enough energy that the player can enjoy the occasional quip and casual death threat as they control Tommy's rise from out-of-towner to Vice City elite.

While the broad strokes of GTAIII included a pastiche of characters and events cribbed from famous crime films, more than anything else it borrowed from the sinister journey of Tony Montana in Scarface. In that 1983 film, Tony starts off as a hoodlum for hire, completing tasks for men above him on the totem pole, until he eventually builds up enough capital (and kills enough competitors) that he achieves great wealth and power. GTAIII's nameless star follows much the same trajectory, and the game even includes an explicit dedication to Scarface in the form of Flashback FM, a diegetic radio station hosted by a DJ named Toni that plays songs straight from the movie's soundtrack.

Most of Scarface took place in Miami, Florida, the primary inspiration for Vice City, giving this game even more reason to remind players of Scarface as often as possible. Early on, Tommy meets a big-shot named Ricardo Diaz, eventually entering his employ and visiting his palatial estate which is the spitting image of Tony's mansion from Scarface. Once Tommy gets enough power to depose Diaz, he takes Diaz's home as his own in an action-packed siege mission. By game's end, Tommy has amassed so much money that he must defend his house from an army of gunmen, just like Tony Montana does in the climax of Scarface.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City's version of the 80s straddles the line between loving tribute and ruthless mockery. The character models definitely fall into the latter category, highlighting the decade's more outrageous fashion and cosmetic choices. Likewise, a recurring advertisement heard over the radio hypes the Degenatron home console and its three different video games, all of which revolve around "red squares" and "green dots."

Yet at startup, Vice City faithfully imitates the operating system of a Commodore 64, a tribute to the home computer that served as the primary game machine for thousands of 80s kids. And say what you want about the clothes or the dancing in the game, but its massive soundtrack embraces the best songs that the 80s has to offer. When you complete the opening cinema and grab a vehicle to drive to your hotel, the first track you'll hear on the radio is Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," a pop smash hit that remains a certified banger to this day.

As fans who arrived late to the Grand Theft Auto III party, only picking up the game after the buzz began, my friends and I treated the release of Vice City as nothing less than a celebratory event. I can remember reserving a copy months in advance, and I'm certain I left my job with the speed of a mongoose on launch day in order to get my hands on my copy at the earliest possible moment. We had played GTAIII for many months, completing the game over and over to the point that we knew Liberty City almost as well as we knew our hometown, so we had high expectations for Vice City.

As much as we thought we could anticipate the Vice City experience, it outdid our wildest preconceptions. Obviously it didn't quite have the same impact that GTAIII had one year earlier, but by building upon everything that its predecessor did right, Vice City overcame what could have been a sophomore slump and instead surpassed the high bar that we had set for it.

The addition of new types of motor vehicles vastly changed the way we made our way around town. Motorcycles add a new dimension of speed to the game, along with a sense of danger; hitting anything while on the back of a bike will send Tommy flying. Access to boats means that all the water surrounding the islands of Vice City are not mere empty space, since Tommy can now hijack a vessel and bypass bridges at any time. Helicopters bring the biggest change, as the ability to travel vertically transforms the entire game. Tall buildings are no longer off-limits, roads no longer define the best route to any destination, and the inclusion of a military chopper means Tommy can rain death from above upon any fool in his sights.

Liberty City in GTAIII had impressed us with its scale, but most of the buildings had no insides, and many of the neighborhoods lacked a distinct flavor as a result. Vice City includes both a variety of outdoor and indoor locations, including an entire shopping mall, all while invoking Miami's distinctive aesthetic. Rockstar's mockup proved so convincing that when I finally visited the real Miami a few years later, I could have sworn it wasn't my first time at the art deco hotel strip on South Beach. Writer Gus Mastrapa later coined a term for this illusionary feeling that you have done something/been somewhere before because you did so in a video game: "Ségà vu."

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City also served as the first major salvo of 80s nostalgia for the PlayStation 2 crowd. My friends and I were all born in the 70s, which means by the time we entered high school, we were the perfect age to reject the party-hardy 80s and embrace the sullen, sarcastic 90s. By 2002, however, we had reached adulthood, and seeing imagery from our childhood in mainstream entertainment—even tongue-in-cheek references—triggered a few happy memories. The early 00s also happened to be a booming era for emulation, so when we weren't playing the latest and greatest games on our televisions, my friends and I spent hours futzing with classic 8 and 16-bit games on our computers. Laying these two facts side-by-side, I completely understand why I, in my mid-to-late 20s, started looking to the past for video games more than the present.

Of course, since Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is now 20 years old, it has become as old-fashioned today as Jungle Hunt or Donkey Kong Jr. were in 2002. I know I'm over-simplifying things, since the open-world gameplay of Grand Theft Auto remains extremely relevant to modern AAA gaming in ways that early 80s arcade titles could only dream of when they turned 20. However, I do wonder when nostalgia for the early-00s will enter the zeitgeist. We don't need to revisit post-9/11 jingoism or rap-rock, thank you very much, but I'd love to see more video games embrace the long-lost Sega Dreamcast aesthetic. And if some of you want to bring back low-rise jeans, I won't complain.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.