Ocean Beach

Ocean Beach is the strip: art deco hotel frontage in pastel, white sand, palms, and the neon that every piece of Vice City marketing has leaned on for twenty-four years.

It carries the same name it had in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002, which makes it one of the clearest pieces of continuity between the two games.

The real thing

The district is Miami Beach's Ocean Drive and the surrounding South Beach blocks. That stretch holds one of the largest concentrations of art deco architecture anywhere in the world, roughly eight hundred protected buildings, most of them put up in the decade after a 1926 hurricane flattened what was there before.

The pastel is not original. Much of it was applied from the late seventies onward as the district was restored, which is why the look reads as eighties even though the buildings are thirties. Vice City has always been nostalgic for a colour scheme that was itself a nostalgia project.

What has been shown

Beach scenes with lifeguard towers and crowds, hotel frontage, rooftop pool decks overlooking the sand, and the nightlife that runs behind it after dark. The official screenshot set spends more time here than anywhere else in the city, which tells you what Rockstar thinks the postcard is.

Rockstar's pre-order copy places a Shore Court personal garage near Ocean Beach, which is the only storage location the studio has tied to the district by name.

What it is for

Every Grand Theft Auto city has a district that exists to be looked at, and it is usually where the game puts its money and its tourists in the same square mile. In a game with an evidence-based police system, a crowded beachfront is also the worst possible place to be recognised.

What is not known

Boundaries, which buildings are enterable, and whether the 2002 layout has been reused in any meaningful way. Rockstar has confirmed the name and shown the district without mapping it.

Related: Vice City, Vice City districts.