How GTA 6 Fans Are Already Putting The Game's Leaked Map Together

In the early hours of September 18, fans of the "Grand Theft Auto" series were treated to an unexpected and unauthorized treat. After years of speculation, a massive leak pertaining to the upcoming "Grand Theft Auto 6" was released on the GTA Forums. The data breach gave fans tons of sneak peeks at Rockstar's in-development title, such as the reveal of two main characters and glimpses into some of the smaller gameplay features. But among the bigger revelations brought about from the leaks was the confirmation of its setting, which is a modern day version of Vice City — a location many are already trying to recreate.

Ever since the development footage from "Grand Theft Auto 6" was leaked, Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have been hard at work attempting to scrub the 90 minutes of footage from the internet. Even posting something as small as a screenshot has been a surefire way to get unceremoniously DMCA'd on sites like YouTube. This has made collecting any tangible data from the game extremely difficult for the virtual cartographers who already aspire to accurately recreate the map that will be in "GTA 6," years before its official release. Despite these challenges, it seems many within the game's sprawling fan community are well on their way to figuring out what this new version of Vice City will look like.

On the GTA Forums, "Grand Theft Auto" players have launched into a lengthy discussion regarding the map and where everything will be situated once the game eventually ships. Using a collection of programs like MS Paint and Google Earth — as well as some math — the community has already created some rough drafts. As using all of these tools to their advantage, a fan-made map of the next-gen Vice City was eventually created and posted to Twitter by fan account Church Of GTA. According to a report from Kotaku, these maps have taken hours upon hours to put together — and the findings have been quite interesting.

Much like the real-life Miami (which inspired the original Vice City), most of the exciting activity will be centered in the eastern section of the city, which is obviously modeled after Miami Beach and its surrounding areas. To the west, things get a bit more scattered, and the fans putting the predictive map together believe these areas will be mostly industrial land. To the north, "GTA" cartographers believe players will see locales resembling swampland, which tracks with the Floridian setting. Furthermore, there are a total of four islands located out in the ocean off the Vice City mainland, a possible reference to the Florida Keys archipelago which lies off the southern coast of Florida north of Cuba. These are comprised of two decently-sized islands to the north and south, with smaller bits of land mass east and west.

To sum up the predictions from the "GTA" community, the map more or less follows the layout of not only the greater Miami area, but Florida in general — sprawling metropolises with a whole lot of nothing in between.

Fans of the "Grand Theft Auto" series coming together and attempting to create the map of the upcoming "Grand Theft Auto 6" isn't a new phenomenon. Back in 2011, many fans did the exact same thing while getting excited about the last entry. Once the trailer for "Grand Theft Auto 5" dropped, GTA Forums users immediately began using the imagery showcased in the teaser to map out Los Santos and its surrounding areas. This is a process that would last until the game arrived, and it was updated every time new pieces of information about the game were revealed by Rockstar Games.

The results of this experiment were so accurate, it's freaky. Well before an official map reveal, users on the forums were able to almost perfectly predict where everything on the map would be. Almost everything — be it the location of downtown Los Santos, Mount Chiliad, and even the Alamo Sea — was pretty much spot-on.

Of course, the folks on the GTA Forums have much less to work with this time around (at the moment), and whatever is available to them is at risk of being taking down by Rockstar at any moment. Even though a large amount of footage has come from the leak, much of "Grand Theft Auto 6" remains an enigma. But given the resourcefulness displayed by these particular GTA Forums users, there's a decent chance that fans may already be clued in as to what Vice City will look like when "GTA 6" is officially released.