Leonida Press
ExplainersUpdated October 8, 2026

What Rockstar has actually said about Leonida and Vice City

Search for the real places behind Vice City and you will find confident answers. This neighbourhood is that part of one Florida city, this swamp is a particular national park, this stretch of dead coastline is the Panhandle. Some of it is probably right. Rockstar has said none of it.

Here is the position on 30 September 2026, seven weeks before launch. Rockstar has named six regions of the state of Leonida and written a paragraph about each. It has named roughly twenty smaller places, a dozen or so fictional businesses, eight characters and one television show. It has published no map, no map key and no list of locations. And across everything it currently publishes about this game, it has never used the word Florida.

That last point is worth sitting with, because it means every real-world identification you have read was made by somebody other than the people who built the place. This page sets out the first-party record instead: what Rockstar has named, in Rockstar’s own words, and where that record stops.

The six regions

They sit on one page, the “Only in Leonida” section of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI site, introduced with a line that is about as specific as the company gets: “Tour a few of the must-see destinations across the sunshine state.” Note “a few”, and note that Rockstar writes “sunshine state” in lower case, as a description rather than as anyone’s official nickname. Its own branded name for the state is the Goodtime State.

Vice City, subtitled “Everything in Excess”. Rockstar opens by placing it in time: “We’re a long way from the ’80s, but Vice City is still the sun and fun capital of America.” Then the fullest passage of city geography it has published anywhere: “The glamour, hustle, and greed of America captured in a single city. Each neighborhood has something to offer, from the pastel art deco hotels and bright white sands of Ocean Beach, to the bustling panaderías of Little Cuba and the bootleg brands of the Tisha-Wocka flea market, out to the VC Port, the cruise ship capital of the world.”

Leonida Keys, subtitled “Gateway to Paradise”. “The dress code is casual, the bars are loaded.” Rockstar calls it a “tropical archipelago” and says life there “isn’t flashy but it’s easy”, then warns that it sits on the doorstep of “some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America”.

Grassrivers, subtitled “Welcome to the Wetlands”. Rockstar’s one-line summary: “The untamable jewel of Leonida’s crown.” “You never know what lies beneath the surface of this primordial expanse. The gators may be the most famous attraction, but there are far deadlier predators and weirder discoveries among the mangroves.”

Port Gellhorn, subtitled “Live Hard”, is the one with teeth. Its summary line is “This is Leonida’s forgotten coast.” The description that follows: “Cheap motels, shut-down attractions, and empty strip malls won’t bring the tourists back, but there’s a new economy in this once-popular vacation spot. It’s fueled by malt liquor, painkillers, and truck stop energy drinks.”

Ambrosia, subtitled “Keeping Leonida Sweet”. “The battle for the health and wealth of Leonida begins here.” The description opens “In the heart of Leonida, American industry and old school values still reign supreme”, then names its one employer: “The Allied Crystal sugar refinery provides the jobs, while the local biker gang provides almost everything else.”

Mount Kalaga, subtitled “Wild, Wild Country”. Its summary line: “Room to breathe on the state’s northern fringes.” “A national landmark up against the state’s northern border, Mount Kalaga offers prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails. In the lush surrounding backwoods, hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals live far from the prying eyes of the government.” Image captions on the same page call it Mount Kalaga National Park.

Read those six together and the geography is thin. Mount Kalaga is on the state’s northern border, Ambrosia’s description opens “In the heart of Leonida”, which may be geography or a figure of speech, and Port Gellhorn is on a coast Rockstar does not name. Rockstar has published no other statement about where any region sits relative to any other. Every fan map that arranges these six into a shape is arranging them on evidence Rockstar did not supply.

The smaller names

These are scattered across Rockstar’s own store and product copy rather than presented as a gazetteer, which is why they rarely appear in roundups.

Inside or near Vice City: Ocean Beach, the Ocean View Hotel, Washington Beach, Shore Drive, Shore Court, Watson Bay, Gambit Bay, Stockyard, Southside Vice City, Little Cuba, the Tisha-Wocka flea market and VC Port. Elsewhere in the state: Lake Leonida, the Leonida Penitentiary and Mount Kalaga National Park. One place outside Leonida gets a mention, in Lucia Caminos’s biography, where her mother has dreamed of a better life “since their days in Liberty City”.

The businesses Rockstar names are mostly shops attached to Ultimate Edition content: Rideout Customs, Sara’s Unisex Salon, the Stock 305 clothing store in Stockyard, the Electric Fang tattoo parlour, One-Eyed Willie’s mod shop in Lake Leonida, the PTT Youngin$ compound in Southside Vice City, the Paradise Garage in Watson Bay, and the Allied Crystal refinery in Ambrosia. Only Raw Records is the record label the character Dre’Quan Priest is building. Vehicle and weapon makers carry over from previous games: Grotti, Vapid, Dinka, Shitzu, Crest, Hawk and Little, Girardi, Klose.

One television show exists, and it is the most recent addition to the record. Macca the Gator is described by Rockstar as “Leonida’s hit TV show”, with Macca himself and Chunkee the Manatee as named characters. It surfaced because Rockstar built a collector’s box around it, which is a reminder that first-party world detail turns up in merchandise listings as readily as in trailers.

What Rockstar has not published

No map. Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI site has four pages: the home page, Media, Music, and Only in Leonida. None of them carries a map of the state, and there is no map page. The only map Rockstar has offered is a physical object, a poster packed in the collector’s box. Its announcement lists it as a “Double-sided souvenir poster showcasing the full Leonida landscape”, and the store adds: “Plan a road trip to every corner of the Goodtime State with a full view of the Leonida map featured on the back.” Nobody outside Rockstar has seen it at a resolution that would settle anything, and it is an illustrated poster rather than a game map.

Six radio stations, named on 8 October 2026, and no station playlists. This page said until that date that not one station, frequency, host or in-game track had been named. Rockstar then named six stations, the voices on each and one dial position, The Chamber 106.6, and credited three licensed songs inside each station’s preview. Our news post on the six stations covers it in full. Two of the names carry setting with them. Flash FM is a returning Vice City station, which Rockstar’s own line calls “The Vice City institution”, and Back Country Radio is described as broadcasting “to the Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, and beyond”, which names two of the six regions without saying anything about where they sit. What has not been published is any station’s actual playlist, or how many stations the game has.

No real-world identification, anywhere. Rockstar’s own legal disclosure on its storefront listing for the game reads: “This game is fictional; any similarities to real-world places, people, or entities are coincidental and do not imply any third-party sponsorship or endorsement of game content.”

That sentence is boilerplate and it is also the only statement Rockstar has made on the subject, which makes it the closest thing to an official position that exists. Treat it as what it is, a legal formula rather than a design note, but notice that the company has published nothing pulling the other way.

Why the fan version is not the same thing

None of this means the identifications are wrong. A studio that puts art deco hotels, white sand, panaderías and a cruise port in one coastal city is not being coy, and anyone who has been to the right part of the United States will recognise what they are looking at. Recognition is a reasonable thing for a player to do.

It is just not the same kind of claim as a sourced fact, and the difference matters more than usual here. Guides built on recognition tend to harden: one site’s careful “this evokes” becomes the next site’s “this is”, and within a few cycles a specific street corner is being asserted with no source anywhere behind it. We only publish what a primary source supports, which is why this page names six regions and stops, rather than telling you which real county the Grassrivers is.

There is also a practical reason to be careful about it before launch. A fictional place built out of recognisable parts is not obliged to keep the real geography. Vice City has existed across four games without ever settling into a stable real-world footprint, and the parts of Leonida with the least real-world shorthand attached, Ambrosia and Port Gellhorn above all, are exactly the ones nobody can usefully describe by pointing at a map of somewhere else.

What would change this

Three things would move the record, and one of them has. A gameplay video or a screenshot set naming a district Rockstar has not named yet would add to the list. The in-game radio announcement landed on 8 October and did name stations, and Flash FM’s return carried exactly the kind of setting this section expected a station name to carry. And the map itself becomes public on launch day, at which point most of this page is superseded by the only authority that actually counts, which is the game.

Until then, six regions, about twenty smaller names, one TV show, six radio stations and no map is the whole of it. Anyone offering more than that is offering you their reading, which may well be a good one, but is not the same thing as Rockstar having said so.

Sources

Every one of these was opened first-hand, the radio announcement on 8 October 2026 and the rest on 30 September 2026.