Since the very first Grand Theft Auto (1997), Rockstar Games has restricted its principal map-making to a narrow geographic vocabulary: Liberty City (a parody of New York City), Vice City (a parody of Miami), Los Santos (a parody of Los Angeles), and the wider state of San Andreas (a composite of California with rural and San Francisco-inspired elements). The original 1997 title already shipped with all three cities in 2D form, and every subsequent main-line entry has rotated back through that founding trio rather than venturing to Chicago, Seattle, Boston, New Orleans, or a non-US locale (Wikipedia, 2026a). The two notable exceptions, GTA: London 1969 and London 1961 (1999), occurred only as 2D expansions and have not been revisited in any 3D or HD universe (Wikipedia, 2026a). The reveal of Grand Theft Auto VI (2026), set in a fictionalised Florida called Leonida and centred on Vice City, confirms that Rockstar continues to treat these three urban anchors as a deliberate rotation rather than a default.
Looking at the main numbered entries, a clear pattern emerges:
Each "generation" of hardware (the 3D universe on PlayStation 2, the HD universe on PlayStation 3/4, and the new HD-era continuation on PlayStation 5) re-uses the same three urban templates rather than introducing new ones (Wikipedia, 2026a). The pattern is not coincidence: Rockstar codenamed VI "Project Americas" and at one point considered partial South American sections, but ultimately retreated to the safer Florida anchor (Wikipedia, 2026b).
Each city functions as a satirical container for a specific slice of American mythology, which is why Rockstar resists replacing them.
Liberty City (NYC) is the natural home of the immigrant-criminal-rises narrative, the Goodfellas and Scarface-via-Brighton-Beach archetype. It anchors stories about organised crime, mafia families, ethnic enclaves, and Wall Street excess — GTA III (2001), Liberty City Stories (2005), and GTA IV (2008) all lean into this Italian-Irish-Slavic-East European underworld (Wikipedia, 2026a). New York's verticality, its dense public-transit grid, and its tabloid culture make it the ideal stage for satirising American capital and tabloid media.
Vice City (Miami) functions as the cocaine-era, Scarface/Miami Vice container. The 2002 game leaned on 1980s synthwave, Cuban exile politics, and pastel art deco; VI will weaponise the same geography for a 2020s update — influencer culture, the "Florida Man" meme, body-cam policing, and modern social-media excess (Wikipedia, 2026b). Miami's tropical-noir aesthetic and its position as a smuggling gateway are too useful a satirical staging ground to abandon.
Los Santos (Los Angeles) and the wider San Andreas state anchor the West Coast mythologies: gang warfare and hip-hop in San Andreas (2004), then tech-money, celebrity, and reality-television satire in GTA V (2013) (Wikipedia, 2026a). The state's countryside, deserts, and a San Francisco analogue (San Fierro) let Rockstar weave in counter-cultural and hippie satire too.
Three structural reasons explain the absence of Chicago, Seattle, Boston, or a returning London map.
First, brand equity. Liberty City, Vice City and Los Santos are themselves products as recognisable as the GTA logo; switching to "Chicago City" would forfeit decades of accumulated player familiarity with neighbourhoods, radio stations, and recurring brands (Wikipedia, 2026a). Rockstar's universes explicitly share "brands, place names and background characters" across decades (Wikipedia, 2026a).
Second, production cost and reference libraries. Modern GTA maps require billion-dollar budgets; VI alone is rumoured at US$1–2 billion (Wikipedia, 2026b). Re-using the three founding cities lets Rockstar amortise location scouting, architectural reference, vehicle archetypes, and accent libraries built up since 1997. A wholly novel city — Chicago's distinct Prairie-school architecture, or Seattle's PNW climate — would require rebuilding those reference libraries from scratch.
Third, satirical specificity. Rockstar's writing has always been a satire of America, and the three coasts they have chosen (East Coast finance, Southern smuggling, West Coast celebrity) collectively map to the cultural fault lines they want to lampoon. A London-2 sequel, by contrast, would require a satire of Britishness that the studio — despite being Scottish at heart, via Rockstar North/DMA Design — has shown little appetite to revisit since 1999 (Wikipedia, 2026a). The 1969 London experiment remained a niche expansion and is generally treated by Rockstar itself as a curio rather than a template.
Grand Theft Auto VI's setting choice is therefore not a return to a "fan favourite" so much as the next predictable step in a 25-year rotation. Vice City was last the primary main-line setting in 2002, and Vice City Stories (2006); over twenty years of cultural drift have given Rockstar fresh material — opioid trafficking, MAGA-era politics, social-media influencer culture, and modern surveillance — to layer on top of the same Miami geography (Wikipedia, 2026b). Crucially, Lucia's backstory ties her to Liberty City, gesturing once again to the three-city mythology even within a single Florida-set narrative (Wikipedia, 2026b). The pattern, in other words, is now self-referential: each new entry treats the previous city's events as part of a shared American canon.
Rockstar's refusal to leave Liberty City, Vice City, and Los Santos/San Andreas is not a creative limitation but a deliberate brand, satirical, and production strategy. The three cities map neatly onto the three regions of America that the studio most enjoys lampooning, they carry decades of accumulated player recognition, and they amortise the colossal cost of building modern open worlds. GTA VI's Leonida slots cleanly into that rotation: it is Miami's turn again, twenty-four years after Vice City (2002), and the satirical lens has simply been updated rather than relocated.
Wikipedia (2026a) Grand Theft Auto. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026b) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026c) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_Vice_City (Accessed: 14 May 2026).