Alongside the release of the second Grand Theft Auto VI trailer on 6 May 2025, Rockstar Games undertook the most substantive expansion of the game's official website to date, publishing dedicated location pages for six discrete regions of the fictional US state of Leonida: Vice City, the Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, and Mount Kalaga National Park (Rockstar Games, 2025; Harte, 2025). The update — comprising roughly 70 high-resolution screenshots together with curated copy describing each district's tone, demographics, and criminal economy — represented a deliberate shift away from the secrecy that has historically defined Rockstar's pre-release communications. By formalising the geographic vocabulary of Leonida on its own domain, the publisher ensured that fan discussion, press coverage, and downstream marketing assets across the GTA VI campaign would converge around a single, authoritative cartography of the world rather than the speculative leak-driven mapping that had dominated the news cycle since 2022 (Wikipedia, 2025).
Until May 2025, the Grand Theft Auto VI website functioned principally as a holding page for the first trailer and the eventual 2025 release window announcement of December 2023 (Wikipedia, 2025). The second trailer, which introduced Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval by full name and broke the 24-hour video-launch record previously held by Deadpool & Wolverine with more than 475 million cross-platform views, was accompanied by a coordinated site refresh that turned rockstargames.com/VI into a destination for sustained dwell-time rather than a one-off transaction (Wikipedia, 2025). Each location received its own visual splash, descriptive paragraph, and the recurring "Explore" call-to-action — for example, "Explore Vice City", "Explore Leonida Keys", "Explore Grassrivers", "Explore Port Gellhorn", "Explore Ambrosia", and "Explore Mount Kalaga" (Rockstar Games, 2025). The structure mirrors the character cards for Jason, Lucia, Cal Hampton, Boobie Ike, Dre'Quan Priest, Real Dimez, Raul Bautista, and Brian Heder, producing a unified content architecture that signals to the audience that the world is itself a protagonist.
Vice City. Returning as the central metropolis, the city is presented as "the glamour, hustle, and greed of America captured in a single city," with named neighbourhoods including Ocean Beach, Little Cuba, the Tisha-Wocka flea market, and the VC Port — the last of which is positioned as a self-styled "cruise ship capital of the world" (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025). The pastel art-deco signifiers tie the reveal directly to nostalgic memory of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) while updating the geography for a contemporary Miami parody.
Leonida Keys. Branded the "Gateway to Paradise," the Keys are framed as a tropical archipelago of retirees, boat parties, dive bars such as The Rusty Anchor, and "some of the most dangerous waters in all of America" (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025). The site explicitly teases an underwater fauna layer with sea turtles, signalling diving as a likely traversal mechanic.
Grassrivers. A swampy Everglades analogue, Grassrivers is described as harbouring "deadlier predators" than its resident alligators — language Game Informer's Charles Harte interpreted as a reference to the heavily armed human residents visible in the screenshots (Harte, 2025).
Port Gellhorn. A fallen vacation town where abandoned strip malls, the Starlet Motel, and the Delights "Cabaret" sit alongside parking lots stocked with "malt liquor, painkillers, and truck stop energy drinks," signalling a region absorbed by the drug economy (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025).
Ambrosia. Described as the "heart of Leonida," anchored by the Allied Crystal sugar refinery and policed by a local biker gang enforcing "old school values" (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025).
Mount Kalaga National Park. The northern wilderness, promising "prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails," along with hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals — language that hints at minigame systems and side-content density (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025).
The website reveal functioned as a force-multiplier on the second trailer rather than a standalone beat. By the morning of 7 May 2025, BBC, Game Informer, GamesRadar+, IGN, and Eurogamer had all published location round-ups whose structural skeleton — six headings, one paragraph each — directly mirrored Rockstar's own page hierarchy (Harte, 2025; Wilson, 2025; Wikipedia, 2025). This is a textbook example of what marketing scholars term "owned-to-earned conversion," wherein controlled first-party content sets the editorial template that secondary outlets are then incentivised to replicate verbatim. The site update also seeded vocabulary — "Grassrivers," "Ambrosia," "Mount Kalaga" — that had no prior currency in the leak community and was therefore unambiguously Rockstar-originated, allowing the publisher to reassert narrative authority over a discourse that had been shaped by the September 2022 teapotuberhacker breach (Wikipedia, 2025).
The May 2025 location reveals via the official website constitute one of the most consequential marketing actions of the GTA VI pre-release cycle. By moving from character-centric to geography-centric storytelling, Rockstar reframed Leonida as a tangible place with internal regions, demographics, and economic textures — a strategy that simultaneously satisfied long-starved fan demand, supplied press outlets with replicable structure, and reclaimed the cartographic narrative from leakers.
Harte, C. (2025) Rockstar Shows Off Six Major Areas Of Vice City In Grand Theft Auto VI, Game Informer, 6 May. Available at: https://www.gameinformer.com/2025/05/06/rockstar-shows-off-six-major-areas-of-vice-city-in-grand-theft-auto-vi (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Rockstar Games (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI — Official Site. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wilson, I. (2025) Every GTA 6 location revealed so far, GamesRadar+, 6 May. Available at: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/grand-theft-auto/gta-6-locations/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).