VICE CITY
Scarface, rewritten.
What does a made guy do when the boss who calls him family keeps trying to bury him?
He stops being his soldier. Builds the south himself. Lets the family watch.
A boy from the
print shop.
Tommy grew up in Portland, Liberty City. His dad ran a print shop, and as a kid he used to spend evenings there helping clean the rollers. The plan was that he'd take over the trade eventually.
That didn't happen. After his father died, things at home got bad, and Tommy ended up on the streets running with Sonny Forelli, who he'd known since they were kids. Within a few years he was a made man in the Forelli family. By the time he was twenty the family had him doing serious work.
Sonny started to worry about how much weight Tommy was putting on.
In 1971, Sonny sent him to do a job in Harwood.
A junkyard. One target.
When he got there, eleven men were waiting for him.
He killed all of them and walked out.
// the press gave him a nickname,
The Harwood Butcher.
Made guys don’t rat. The rat and his entire bloodline get erased. Tommy knew the code. He did the fifteen years and never gave up a name. The Forellis kept his spot warm.
“Say hello to my little friend.”
[ Tony Montana, Scarface (1983) // dir. Brian De Palma ]
Vice City is a
love letter to Scarface.
Vice City wasn’t subtle about its influences. Dan Houser, the lead writer at Rockstar at the time, has talked openly about how much of Scarface made it into the game. Rockstar moved the story from a Cuban refugee in 1980s Miami to an Italian-American ex-con in 1986 Vice City, but kept the cocaine empire, the mansion shootout, and the chainsaw scene in the bathroom almost shot for shot.
Tommy and Tony share most of their DNA. They both come into Miami as outsiders, climb through cocaine, and end up rattling around enormous empty mansions surrounded by enemies. The interior of the Vercetti Estate is essentially modeled on the Montana mansion, down to the staircase. Rockstar got Ray Liotta to voice Tommy because they wanted real crime-film weight in the protagonist.
When we designed this tee, we never tried to pick between Scarface and Vice City. Both were on the moodboard the whole time. The look-book pulls a bit wider too, with quiet nods to The Sopranos in the deli setting and to every mob soldier in an Adidas tracksuit you’ve ever seen on screen. The shirt is a small attempt to let all of those sit in the same room.
Cash, stamped
in blood.
The front is a stack of bills with the Rush logo stamped into it in red ink, and Vice City set above it in the original Scarface title font. It sits centered on the chest, small. The kind of thing someone might miss on the first look, but spot every time after.
Tommy’s whole arc starts with this stack. In ’86 Sonny sent him to Florida for a coke deal. Someone leaked the meet. Tommy got ambushed, his guys got killed, the cash disappeared. Sonny didn’t ask who leaked it. Didn’t ask about the dead. He asked when he was getting paid back. That was the moment Tommy stopped seeing him as family.
The same story plays out in the film. Tony Montana ends up dead in his mansion counting his. Tommy ends up alive in his mansion counting his, with everyone who tried to take it from him on the floor around him. The graphic compresses both endings into one stack of bills. Money runs everything in this story, and everyone who forgets it loses.
The poster,
recast.
The back is the 1983 Scarface theatrical poster with one swap. Tony Montana’s silhouette is replaced by Tommy Vercetti’s. The billing block underneath isn’t a cast list. It credits the actual people who made Vice City in real movie-poster format. Ray Liotta gets billed as “Vice City” the way Al Pacino was billed as “Scarface” in 1983. Dan Houser takes the screenplay and producer credits. Navid Khonsari directs. It’s a version of the poster Vice City probably should have had in 2002.
Production Leslie Benzies · Game Sam Houser
Ray Liotta “Vice City”
Screenplay by Dan Houser · Music by Craig Conner
Art Director Aaron Garbut · Cinematics Producer Jamie King
Produced by Dan Houser
Directed by Navid Khonsari
He was Tommy Vercetti.
The world remembers him as The Harwood Butcher.
Reworked from the original Scarface (1983) tagline:
“He was Tony Montana. The world will remember him by another name.”
He loved the American dream.
With a vengeance.
240 gsm french terry cotton. DTF print on the front, screen-printed back. Oversized cut. Heavyweight construction that still breathes in Indian summers.
[ Wear the Name → ]