Eurogamer's Vice City retrospective reminds me how much of GTA's DNA started there

Eurogamer put up a Vice City retrospective for the game's 24th anniversary, and it's a good excuse to think about how much of what we expect from Rockstar now got locked in with that one.

The bit that got me was the Burt Reynolds story. Apparently during a recording session for the game, Reynolds told the producers to get "the limey" out of the room when Dan Houser walked in. Houser wouldn't leave, because he'd come down specifically to meet one of his heroes, and the two of them ended up chest to chest, ready to throw hands before a studio engineer pulled them apart. That's an absurd image. Two grown men about to brawl over a voice acting session for a PS2 game.

It also says a lot about how Rockstar approached casting back then. They weren't just grabbing whoever was cheap and available. They went after people they genuinely admired, and sometimes that meant things got heated. You can feel that energy in the final product. Vice City has a specific swagger that later entries never quite replicated, even when they were technically more ambitious.

the formula started clicking here

Eurogamer's angle is that Vice City is where Rockstar's killer formula really took shape, and 24 years on it's still one of the best games ever made. Hard to argue with that. The 80s setting, the soundtrack, the scarface pastiche, the way the radio stations became characters in their own right. All of that became a template.

And now we're eight days out from Leonida. Different state, different decade, different protagonists, but the lineage is obvious. Lucia and Jason exist in a world that Vice City built the blueprint for. The satire, the cinematic framing, the obsession with music and atmosphere. None of it starts with VI.

I'm replaying Vice City this week while I wait. Feels like the right way to count down.

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Source: Eurogamer · Curated content.