GTA 6 fans are pinpointing real Miami locations behind Vice City's apartments

Ahead of GTA 6's November 19 launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, fans are doing what GTA fans do best — obsessively cross-referencing every frame of Rockstar's footage against real Miami geography. Two separate discoveries have surfaced in the past week, and both are impressively specific.

The first comes from Instagram user prettyboycuh, who traced Jason and Lucia's apartment — seen at the 6:20 mark in Rockstar's Official Extended Gameplay trailer — to a now-demolished building near the Quantum on the Bay Condominium on Bayshore Drive in Miami. The catch: the building was knocked down sometime in 2023, meaning he had to dig through Google Maps' historical imagery all the way back to 2013 to find a matching photo. His reasoning for starting there was that Rockstar began developing GTA 6 around 2013, which is exactly the kind of lateral thinking that makes GTA fan communities both impressive and slightly unnerving. The route Jason drives from the apartment doesn't map perfectly onto real Miami streets, but Rockstar has clearly compressed the city's layout to fit the game's scale. The visual match on the building itself is hard to argue with. The second find involves Dexter Morgan's apartment from the TV show Dexter — the exterior of which was filmed at the Bay Harbor Club condos in Miami — which fans spotted appearing to show up in Vice City as well. Given that the second season of Dexter Resurrection is set to air around the same time GTA 6 launches in November, some players are already theorizing about in-game nods to the show.

Rockstar has been deliberately selective about what it satirizes in GTA 6. Co-studio head Rob Nelson told IGN that the team is being careful to avoid references that might feel dated by the time the game ships — which is why neither Donald Trump nor the COVID-19 pandemic will be targets. Whether Dexter makes the cut as a satirical subject remains to be seen. What's clear is that Rockstar did its homework on Miami's real geography, even sourcing buildings that no longer exist.

The broader context here is that GTA 6 is shaping up to be enormous in every sense — the map is reportedly three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2's, a full playthrough can run around 80 hours, six-star wanted levels are back, and yes, you can pet the dog. Fan location-hunting will only intensify as the November release approaches.