A Satellite Viewer for GTA Maps Shows How Big Leonida Really Is: Vice City Alone Beats All of GTA 4

The GTA 6 community keeps producing tools that feel more like software products than fan projects, and the latest is a satellite viewer: a Google Earth style application that loads GTA maps as globes you can spin, tilt and fly through in 2D or 3D with a free camera. It sits in the same family as the route planner we covered and the version 16 community map, which is exactly the map the viewer uses for Leonida, since no 3D build of GTA 6 exists to load.

The honest part is the licensing. The viewer does not ship Rockstar’s maps: to import GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA 4 or GTA 5, you need legitimate PC copies of each game installed, and the tool reads the geometry from your own files. Creators have been publishing walkthroughs with every map loaded side by side under the nickname GTA USA, one interactive sun included, and the result is the first place you can stand the whole series next to Leonida at once.

The viewer’s area widgets let you trace any region and read back square kilometres and miles, and one creator’s measuring session turned into a quiet demolition of series history. The first overlay drops GTA 4 onto the new Vice City, and the city alone swallows it: not Liberty City, the entire GTA 4 map. Tracing finer, Vice Beach on its own comes out around 2.4 square kilometres, about the footprint of one full GTA 4 borough.

Los Santos fares little better. The whole city that has felt enormous since 2013 traces out at 3.7 square miles, while new Vice City’s main urban block alone reads 4.24, before Vice Beach is even counted. The 2002 Vice City, a complete game map in its day, fits into its successor roughly two and a half times. The one modest reading is Lake Leonida, which lands within a rounding error of the Alamo Sea at a little over half a mile across, though a lake matching GTA 5’s biggest water feature is only modest until you remember it occupies one corner of one county.

Then there are the airports. Vice City International traces out at nearly twice GTA 5’s Los Santos International, which itself holds three or four of GTA 4’s airport. Stack GTA 4’s and GTA 5’s airports together and they still do not cover the GTA 6 one. Treat every figure as rough, since the regions are hand-traced and the Leonida side relies on the community map, but the rankings are hard to argue with.

The session’s running theme is that flat maps distort scale. Leonida looks deceptively like GTA 5’s layout at a glance, a lake in the middle, mountains up top, the city at the bottom, and only the overlay makes the size difference land. The same trick works at street level: GTA 4 feels vast on the ground, yet its whole footprint disappears inside one modern district. The viewer’s free camera makes that argument better than any chart, because you can drop to eye level on an imported map and then lift off to watch it dissolve into a corner of the state.

None of this floats free of the official record. Rockstar’s stated comparisons, collected in our map size explainer, put Leonida at twice GTA 5’s map and Vice City at twice Los Santos, and the hand-traced readings line up with those ratios remarkably well. When the fan tooling and the developer’s own numbers agree, the conclusion is probably safe. On November 19 the measuring stops and the driving starts.