Rumormill: Next stop, Vice City?

Some of you might have picked up the retail edition of Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City.   Even less of you probably bothered to read through the game’s Manual.   Well, you might have missed a small teaser of what’s to come for the GTA Universe toward the last few pages:

In GTA style the manual features several mock ads alongside the actual instruction pages.  The full page fake ad for a fake movie “Liberty City, It’s over!” features the cover art from GTAIV inside a broken heart, and the tagline “Next stop.” above a rip in the poster.   It’s also a parody of a real poster from the film “New York, I love you”.

But more importantly the ad is a clear teaser for the next GTA in the series.  Rockstar has been pretty clear that The Ballad of Gay Tony episode would be the last for the GTAIV trilogy, and the events from the expansion tie up the main events from the original game pretty nicely.  And seeing as GTA is a multi-million dollar franchise, Rockstar would be crazy to stop making games for the series so…….

….Here we are.   We know there’s another GTA coming.  But what else exactly does this page hint towards?  Well, no one really knew until a few days ago.  Apparently some fan forum members have examined the rip on the poster a little more closely.  There has been some debate on what the inside of the rip really signified, until someone managed to match the inside rip with another mock poster from an earlier GTA game:

Vesuvius Citrate: For Outstanding Erections.  Featured in GTA: Vice City, the poster is for an erectile-dysfunction pill using an exploding volcano and two large hills in the foreground.  Fans were able to layer this poster against the inside rip from the movie ad which shows an exact match when the poster is mirrored:

Here’s a .gif for further clarity:

Although this might seem like a stretch to some, the idea that Vice City will be the next location for GTA is even further reinforced by the fact that the retail version of Episodes from Liberty City includes an exclusive bonus radio station “Vice City FM”, featuring songs from the 1980’s.

Seeing as the ad also mentions that the “movie” opens in March, this suggests that Rockstar might make their next official GTA announcement on that month next year.

Regardless of how accurate this rumor turns out to be, the fact is we’ve gotten a GTA game (or at least an expansion) every single year since the release of GTA:III.  So I’m willing to bet that we’ll be seeing another game in the series before the end of next year.

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