When Miami sued Vice City: the Haitian controversy that contrasts with today's GTA VI embrace

Miami-Dade now embraces GTA VI with signs in downtown Miami, but the city’s relationship with the franchise was not always this friendly. WLRN, South Florida’s public broadcaster, today revisits the story of how the original GTA Vice City sparked protests and a federal lawsuit over its portrayal of the Haitian community.

It happened in 2002. Vice City, set in a 1980s Miami pastiche, included a mission in which the character Umberto Robina ordered an attack on a rival gang explicitly identified as Haitian. The line outraged Haitian-American organizations in South Florida, which in 2004 sued Rockstar Games, Take-Two, Wal-Mart, Sony and Microsoft. They asked for the game to be pulled from shelves or, failing that, for a large warning label on the boxes.

The lawsuit, moved to federal court, was closed after Rockstar agreed to change the dialogue and remove the ethnic references in later versions of the game. Players who updated their copy played the same mission without Robina naming the gang’s origin.

Two decades later, the contrast is striking: Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s administration was the one that approached Rockstar to promote GTA VI and its Miami connection, going as far as installing a giant sign on the Kaseya Center despite protests from the county sheriff.

WLRN’s report also puts numbers to the phenomenon: Mat Piscatella of analytics firm Circana recalls that the franchise has sold more than 475 million copies and that GTA V, with 230 million, is the best-selling console and PC game in US history. On November 19, GTA VI will write the next chapter of a relationship with Miami that is far older and more turbulent than it seems.