GTA 6 Officially Details How Social Media Works in Vice City

Grand Theft Auto has always used its fictional cities to make fun of whatever is happening in American culture, and GTA 6 is arriving at a point where social media is almost impossible to separate from everyday life. Vice City is filled with influencers, celebrities, tourists, musicians, and people constantly worried about how they look. Rockstar is taking that idea seriously enough that it has become part of how the open world of GTA 6 was designed.

The focus on appearances also goes beyond the people players will meet. GTA 6 has a much more detailed population than previous games, with Rockstar creating different clothing, hairstyles, body types, tattoos, piercings, and other visual details for people throughout Leonida. The goal is for the population to look like it belongs to the specific places it occupies, whether that means Vice City’s wealthier areas or other parts of the state.

Image via Rockstar Games
Image via Rockstar Games
Source: Rockstar

In a recent interview with Dazed, Rockstar Games stylist Jillian Carr explained how important GTA 6‘s NPC variety and social media is:

“Vice City is built around vanity. Between social media, celebrity culture and a constant flow of tourists, appearances carry significant weight, and trend cycles turn over quickly.”

Carr’s comment reflects why GTA 6‘s social media goes further than GTA 5‘s parodies of Facebook and Twitter (Lifeinvader and Bleeter). Social media is part of the culture Rockstar is trying to recreate in Vice City, and Dazed specifically confirmed that the game has working social media feeds. If someone opens up a social media feed and sees a character located in a certain part of Vice City (or the greater Leonida area), players will be able to go there and find that NPC. As of this writing, confirmed phone and social media apps include:

BuckMe
RydeMe
Scooter Bros
WhatUp
Waink (for stealing cars in GTA 6)
Snapmatic
and a Fitness App
Probably More

Build your perfect top ten one reveal at a time.

Those feeds will give GTA 6 another way to show what is happening throughout Leonida without forcing everything into a mission, blending how GTA 6‘s story and open-world work together. Rockstar’s official material has already established how characters such as Real Dimez use social media to build their fame, as but one example, and players will be able to get involved in that world approach, too. Bae-Luxe and Roxy have a “relentless social media presence,” with their careers growing through viral videos and music.

Real Dimez is only one example of what this means for GTA 6. Their rise can be followed through in-game viral social media posts, giving players a way to see a story developing without necessarily being directly involved in it. The phone itself is also a physical object that GTA 6 protagonists Jason and Lucia can use while moving through the world, including while one character is driving and the other is browsing the phone.

Rockstar is using social media to reinforce one of the defining ideas behind GTA 6‘s version of Vice City. People care about how they look, celebrities can become famous through viral attention, and trends can change quickly in a place where appearances carry so much weight. Rockstar is building a world where those ideas show up in the characters, brands, clothes, music, and social feeds, making Carr’s description of Vice City as a city built around vanity feel apt.