In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Rockstar North’s penchant for parody meets the developer’s precision of period pastiche. Way back in 2002, the renowned studio built one of the most authored and knowable open worlds in games, one that still stands as an ideal design document for a more bespoke approach. That approach has since been displaced by emergent possibilities and player agency, but it marks a direction open-world design was once heading — an alternate timeline of strongly designed playable spaces, defined by cartoon character, contextual consistency, and a compact, circular layout. The cohesion is the point, and it comes from how each part of the city is constructed from the same design philosophy.
The key to Vice City’s design starts with readability. The city is built as a circuit, looping the player through environments that could never be mistaken for one another. The pastel art deco of Ocean Beach looks nothing like the destitution of Little Haiti, and neither resembles Starfish Island, the uber-rich seat of power at the center of the map. The beauty of Vice City’s design, more than any other game in the series, is that you can always ascertain where you are and where you’re going. Because the spaces are easy to memorize, they help grow the player’s sense of belonging in this space, as the compact nature of the island layouts conveys a constant stream of usable information about how to navigate the game world, but also what it means to exist within it.
Tommy Vercetti, voiced by Ray Liotta, is an iconic protagonist shaped by the very fabric of Vice City. What defines Tommy, beyond the hilarious cognitive dissonance required to follow the Tony Montana Path, is his assimilation into Floridian excess, a deepened relationship his character seems to have with the world, and that the world seems to have with him. It’s helpful Tommy is clad in a loud Hawaiian shirt, always on vacation, and his perpetual vacation is the business of crime. A far cry from the anonymity of Grand Theft Auto III (2001)’s Claude, no longer a blank space for audience self-insertion. As with the design of the world, our protagonist is now modeled and authored around the context of the game, an avatar for the dangers and excesses of the American Dream, the way you can never really have it without suffering grave Pyrrhic costs.
Vice City is America as viewed through her own media. The game understands how America already hates and loves itself more than anyone else ever could. The country deserves to be celebrated at its funeral. Often American spaces are best conveyed from the outside looking in, as the Italian Western proved. Rockstar North is a Scottish studio, and the America it knows is the one America exported: Scarface (1983); Miami Vice (1984); and RoboCop (1987).
Vice City’s radio stations are where the game pulls it all together. The stations, like the discursive ad breaks in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, complete the visual detail of Vice City, by adding a parallel audio roadmap to the city’s soul, or lack thereof, depending on what’s playing. Radio hosts chatter over each other — everyone is talking and nobody is listening — and era-specific music (a definitive ‘80s soundtrack) warmly cuts up all the broken communication. That’s how Vice City is. If one thing is true, the harsh opposite must also be true. That’s the essence of America, anyway, that two extreme and opposite things must always be true at exactly the same time.
The game’s day and night cycle is likewise built with duality in mind. By day the city is drenched in sun, and by night it’s infused with neon. Every space is designed to work in both lights, which gives the city a greater aesthetic dimension. The water does the same double duty. Because the player cannot swim, it is an imposing wall on progression, but it is also the frame around every space, and depending on the hour it looks like a warm day at the beach or a neon nightmare.
Vice City is an elegy for the ephemeral eighties as they existed in the media. The beauty of the game’s elegiac vocabulary is that it holds equal space for celebrating and decimating the culture it’s about. It says, this profound concept of America is dead, and here are all the reasons it has died. The oft-puerile approach to satire balances its frivolity on a scale with equal weight given to the grandiosity and beauty of these farcical American dreams. These dreams could only die. But first, they could only live in America.