All GTA Game Locations: Every City and Setting from GTA 1 to GTA 6

Rockstar has spent nearly 30 years building the same handful of fictional places, over and over, at greater and greater scale. Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas are as much series characters as any protagonist — and the rare times GTA has gone somewhere else are just as memorable. Here is every location the series has used, game by game, and what each city is really based on.

Every GTA Setting at a Glance

Liberty City — New York, Six Times Over

No location defines GTA like Liberty City. Rockstar's take on New York City has hosted six games, from the original 1997 title through GTA 3's revolution to GTA 4's dense reinvention. It sits in the fictional state of Liberty, and Rockstar keeps finding new corners of it: the original game added New Guernsey as a New Jersey stand-in, while GTA 4 expanded the map with Alderney, a New Jersey analogue folded into the metropolitan area. Rain, traffic, ambition and disappointment — Liberty City is where GTA goes to be serious.

San Andreas — From One City to a Whole Coast

San Andreas has had the strangest evolution of any GTA location. In 1997 it was a single city, a stand-in for San Francisco. In 2004 it exploded into an entire state modelled on California and Nevada, containing Los Santos (Los Angeles), San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas), plus countryside, desert and Mount Chiliad. GTA 5 then narrowed the focus back down to Los Santos and rural Blaine County — one city of the state, rendered in more detail than the whole 2004 map. Same name, three completely different scales.

Vice City — Miami in Neon

Vice City is Rockstar's Miami: beaches, pastel art deco, speedboats and criminal excess. The 2D-era version was a generic southeastern coastal city, but GTA: Vice City in 2002 fixed its identity forever — a 1986 time capsule that players still measure open worlds against. For years the games never named its state; GTA 6 resolves that at last by placing Vice City inside Leonida, Rockstar's Florida, complete with the Leonida State Police seen in the first trailer and whole regions beyond the city — keys, swamps, small towns and a national park.

London — The One Real Name

The series' great exception. The GTA: London 1969 and London 1961 expansion packs used a real city's actual name — the only time Rockstar has done so — for a swingin'-sixties take on the formula, complete with a Manchester multiplayer map. It remains a beloved oddity, and a standing rebuke to anyone who says GTA could never work outside America.

Anywhere City — The City That Is Nowhere

GTA 2's setting is deliberately not based on anywhere. Anywhere City is an unnamed near-future metropolis divided into Commercial, Residential and Industrial districts (later versions added a light rail system), and Rockstar never repeated the experiment. Every GTA since has gone back to a real American city in disguise — which makes Anywhere City the series' fascinating dead end.