GTA Vice City Stories is the Vice City prequel you can't buy digitally anymore

GTA Vice City Stories (VCS) is the tenth game in the series, made by Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar North. It's a prequel to GTA Vice City: it's set in 1984, two years before Tommy Vercetti's story, in the same Miami-inspired Vice City.

The protagonist is Victor "Vic" Vance, a corporal at the Fort Baxter army base. He appeared in Vice City as a minor character, while his brother Lance Vance is one of that game's key characters. Vic agrees to help a corrupt sergeant to earn money for his sick brother Pete's medicine, but the sergeant sets him up and Vic is dishonorably discharged. From there, together with Lance, he builds his own criminal empire and runs into the Mendez brothers, the city's biggest drug lords.

The game's new feature is the empire system: Vic takes over rival businesses, does each one's jobs and grows his income. Instead of hidden packages there are 99 red balloons, a nod to Nena's hit "99 Luftballons", which played in Vice City. The map is familiar, adjusted for 1984: some buildings aren't finished yet, and others stand where something completely different will later be.

The PSP release slipped several times: North America was originally planned for October 17, 2006. Rockstar announced the PS2 version on February 7, 2007, and released it on March 6, an almost direct port with better graphics, draw distance and a few new side activities.

Rockstar never explained why VCS was pulled from digital stores. Delisted Games suggests music licensing: according to the site, Liberty City Stories stayed on sale at the same time. There's no official confirmation of that theory.

As of October 31, 2026, only physical copies: a used PlayStation 2 disc or PSP UMD. The game isn't on PlayStation Store for PS4 or PS5, nor on Steam, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop, the App Store or Google Play. In 2017 the ESRB rated VCS and LCS for PS4, but the re-releases never came.

If it's Vice City you're after, GTA Vice City is legally available in Trilogy – The Definitive Edition for PC and consoles and separately on mobile. And if you're interested in a story from the same handheld GTA era, its sister game Liberty City Stories is still on sale for iOS and Android.

There's no official PC version, so there are no official system requirements either. Rockstar never released VCS on Windows. Searches for "Vice City Stories PC" usually lead to fan projects that move the game into other series games' engines; Rockstar didn't create or support them. Without your own copy of the game, such builds aren't a legal way to play.

As in Liberty City Stories, multiplayer is PSP only: up to six players over local Wi-Fi (ad hoc) in ten modes with cars, planes and boats. The PS2 version has no multiplayer.

The voice acting is in English, the language the game was written and recorded in.

Cheats are entered as button combos during play, without pausing. For example: full health is ↑ ↓ ← → ○ ○ L R (L1 and R1 instead of L and R on PS2), armor is ↑ ↓ ← → □ □ L R, $250,000 is ↑ ↓ ← → ✕ ✕ L R, and the Rhino tank is ↑ L ↓ R ← L → R. The full table with weapon sets, weather and traffic is on the GTA Vice City Stories cheats page.