The Real Cities Behind Liberty City, Vice City and Los Santos
Rockstar's fictional cities are caricatures of real places. Here is what they borrow, and what they twist.
Grand Theft Auto has never tried to be a documentary. Its cities are distorted portraits: real places seen through a satirical lens, with names changed just enough to keep the lawyers calm and the jokes sharp. But the inspirations are not a mystery. They are among the best-documented facts about the series.
Liberty City and New York
Liberty City is New York, plainly and deliberately. In Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001, the city’s districts are broad analogues of the real boroughs and their surroundings: Portland stands loosely for Brooklyn and Queens, Staunton Island for Manhattan and Shoreside Vale for the suburbs of New Jersey. Fans and reference guides generally agree on these correspondences, though the mapping was never a one-to-one recreation, and it is best read as a set of echoes.
Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 reimagined the city at higher fidelity. Its boroughs, Broker, Dukes, Bohan, Algonquin and Alderney, are usually paired with Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan and New Jersey respectively. The game’s version of the Statue of Liberty, the Statue of Happiness, is a good example of the series’ approach: recognisable enough to land the joke, altered enough to make a point about what American promise has turned into.
Vice City and Miami
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City took the visual and cultural language of 1980s Miami, the pastel palette, the neon signs, the beachfront hotels and the drug-money glamour that pop culture of the era had already made iconic. Its setting is 1986 and its atmosphere owes plenty to the crime stories and films of the period. The place does not map street for street. It captures what the city felt like in the popular imagination, which is a different thing from a map.
That is worth stressing. Vice City is not really a portrait of Miami. It is a portrait of a fantasy of Miami, filtered through the decade’s television and cinema. It was a smart choice, because the fantasy is more fun than the real city and much more distinctive than a generic coastal town.
Los Santos and Los Angeles
Los Santos stands in for Los Angeles, and it did so first in San Andreas, whose fictional state also included stand-ins for San Francisco and Las Vegas. Grand Theft Auto V rebuilt Los Santos at a much larger scale in 2013, drawing on the visual grammar of Southern California, from freeway interchanges and beachfront boardwalks to the hills above the city.
Los Angeles is a particularly rich target for satire because so much of its identity is already tied to image: celebrity, aspiration, car culture and the constant performance of success. The game’s parodies of tech companies, talk radio and reality television target that culture more than any specific street.
Why the approach works
The trick is proportion. A city needs to be familiar enough that players immediately recognise its rhythm, and different enough that the game can say what it likes. Real place names and real brands would bring baggage. Invented ones give Rockstar freedom, and they let each setting work as a character in its own right.
It is also a reminder that these are constructed worlds, not travel guides. If you are planning to drive Broker to Algonquin in real life, you will find you have a very different trip on your hands. What the games offer is an interpretation, and the interpretation is the art.