Officials with Miami-Dade County have held talks with Rockstar about using facilities and landmarks in the county to promote the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6, according to a recent report by The Miamian, saying it could represent “a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience.” Just one problem: the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office is dead-set against it.
The Miamian report (via RPS) says the county submitted a pitch deck to Rockstar on June 29, after which staff had “some conversations with Rockstar about potential opportunities around the launch of GTA 6,” said Carlos Suarez, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
“Nothing has been formally agreed to or approved, and any idea would have to go through the appropriate review and approval process,” Suarez said. “Given Miami-Dade’s clear influence on the game, we think there could be a unique opportunity to generate revenue for the County while showcasing Miami-Dade to a massive audience.”
Miami-Dade is the inspiration for Vice City in the GTA series, and by “inspiration” I mean it basically is Vice City, although Miami exists as a separate city in the game’s fiction. Vice City will serve as a central location in GTA 6, and will represent the seat of Vice-Dale County, much as the city of Miami is the county seat of Miami-Dade. Given that, the campaign makes obvious sense, and most of the ideas floated don’t sound too overly disruptive.
Some examples:
A display aircraft wrapped in Vice City logos and a GTA 6-inspired baggage claim at Miami International Airport
Vice City signage and colors at the Metromover and Metrorail transit stations
Vice City-inspired installations or public art at PortMiami
A “family appropriate” celebration of “Miami car culture” with cars, bikes, DJs, food, artists, and branded installations at Tropical Park
A Vice City Radio Lab at the city’s main library, providing access to recording, editing, and digital media equipment to support “music production, podcasting, oral histories, neighborhood storytelling, sound engineering, video-game development, and other creative programming, while reflecting the central role that music and radio play in the GTA experience
The pitch also includes ideas for Rockstar funding permanent upgrades to county infrastructure:
(Image credit: Miami-Dade County)
That all sounds pretty cool to me, and some of it is quite civically wholesome, too. Yes, it’s all part of the monstrous marketing machine for the biggest videogame of all time, but it also seems like the county is coming at it as a way to celebrate the real people and civic culture that led Rockstar to embrace Miami in the first place, and that counts for something.
The big stumbling block, of course, is that the GTA games are the polar opposite of civic-minded and wholesome, and that’s led Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz to speak out against the idea.
“Grand Theft Auto is a videogame franchise built around criminal activity,” Cordero-Stutz told the Miami Herald. “Its fictional world includes murder, robbery, drug trafficking, carjacking, violence against law enforcement, and other conduct that the men and women of the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office work every single day to prevent.”
Miami-Dade Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez also spoke out against the idea: “We should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence.”
The sheriff isn’t wrong. GTA games have always been notoriously violent: Former attorney Jack Thompson, at one time the videogame industry’s foremost nemesis, spent years campaigning hard against the games and publisher Take-Two Interactive before he was finally disbarred for his relentless antics and misconduct.
But the game industry, and its audience, have matured in the 25 years (that’s right, look it up) since Grand Theft Auto 3 changed everything: GTA is still steeped in criminal violence, but the shock factor—and the hand-wringing over it—are long gone. These days it’s completely mainstream, as evidenced by the performance of the GTA 6 reveal showcase on Netflix, which was the platform’s biggest show of the week.
Would Miami-Dade have to tone down some of the seedier elements of GTA 6 for its “family appropriate” events? Sure. But I also have no doubt that a significant number of sheriff’s deputies and police in the county grew up playing GTA themselves, and I bet an awful lot of them will be calling in sick when GTA 6 drops.
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