In the game
The first trailer’s Vice City is built on this strip: low pastel hotels with rounded corners and neon lettering, palms in a strip of park, and the beach just beyond, all of it lit in late-afternoon gold. Rockstar has since named the district Ocean Beach in official material, and the Extended Look spends time at street level on the same kind of strip.
Fans matched it within hours, and the match is a clear one. It rests on the architecture: the porthole windows, the “eyebrow” ledges over the windows, the stacked neon signs and the three-story height that every building shares. Nothing else in Florida looks like this, and Rockstar has drawn on it before, in the 2002 Vice City.
Which real hotels have game twins, if any, is not something the footage tells you. Treat the game’s signs as riffs, not one-to-one copies.
The real place
Ocean Drive runs about a mile along the front of South Beach, from South Pointe up to 15th Street. The hotels went up between the late 1920s and early 1940s, went to seed for decades, and were saved in the late 1970s when a preservation group led by Barbara Baer Capitman got the district onto the National Register. Around 800 buildings in the wider Art Deco District survived because of that fight.
Today it is a slow, loud, sunlit promenade: cafe tables under awnings on one side, Lummus Park and the beach on the other, classic cars parked for photos, and music from every second doorway. The detail a GTA fan will recognize at once is the Colony Hotel’s blue neon sign, the most photographed facade on the strip and the template for a hundred film and game Vice Cities.
Go there
Start at the south end and walk north in the morning, when the light is on the facades and the crowds are still asleep. The Art Deco Welcome Center at 1001 Ocean Drive runs guided walking tours most days, usually around $30-40 per person; check times before you go. Cross into Lummus Park to see the buildings as a row, which is how the trailer frames them.
Come back after dark. The neon is the point, and it looks best in the hour after sunset when the sky is still deep blue.
For food, walk two blocks inland. Joe’s Stone Crab on Washington Avenue has been open since 1913 and is the city’s most famous restaurant; stone crab season runs mid-October to early May, and a sit-down meal is $60-120 a head. The Cuban diners along Collins Avenue are the budget option.
One honest warning: the cafes on Ocean Drive are known for automatic 18-20 percent service charges and expensive drinks. Read the menu and ask whether gratuity is included before you sit down. Parking is $20-40 a day in the garages on Collins and Washington; do not try the street.
Nearby
- Vice Beach and its lifeguard towers: the sand is across Lummus Park, and the towers are the other half of the trailer’s opening shots.
- Neon nightlife and the club circuit: the strip after dark leads straight into South Beach’s club scene.
- The causeway highway: the road in from downtown lands at the south end of the strip.
Updated September 12, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.