WWE went to the United States Patent and Trademark Office in August and tried to lock up the words Vice City. Six weeks before GTA VI launches, that application is dead.
The filing was made on August 8, 2026, and the record shows the application was abandoned on September 21. IGN reported the abandoned status on September 23, and Fightful and Insider Gaming picked it up within a day of each other. Nobody at WWE has explained why the company let it lapse, and nobody at Rockstar or Take-Two has commented on the filing at all.
The most plausible reading is that this was never about Grand Theft Auto. WWE has a wrestler on its main roster called Lola Vice, and she is from Miami, Florida, the real city that Vice City was built on. A trademark filing for Vice City in a wrestling context lines up with a themed ring name, merchandise, or an event concept built around her. It does not line up with a wrestling company trying to publish a video game.
That distinction matters for anyone watching GTA VI's marketing run and wondering whether the name is suddenly contested. It is not. Rockstar has shipped Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and it has spent the last two decades building a setting that people recognize from three words alone. Trademark rights in the United States rest primarily on use in commerce, and Rockstar's use of the Vice City name is about as documented as use gets. A dead application from a promotion that never put anything on sale does not change that. If anything, the abandoned filing is evidence of the opposite: whoever looked at the risk decided the fight was not worth having.
What is worth noting is the timing. The application went in on August 8. GTA VI arrives November 19. Any half-serious attempt to claim the Vice City name in 2026 was always going to run into the largest entertainment launch of the decade, and the month before the marketing machinery really starts moving is not a moment when anyone wants to be the party arguing about who owns the words on the box.
Rockstar has been unusually active about the name in the physical world. The company has put close to a million dollars into "Welcome to Vice City" signage around real Miami in the run up to launch, which is a fairly direct way of saying that the setting is a brand it intends to own in the public imagination, not merely a level name. Against that backdrop, a wrestling promotion quietly withdrawing a trademark application reads less like a legal event and more like a scheduling decision.
There is also a quieter marketing story underneath. Next Vice has tracked the wider GTA VI marketing push through the summer, and the pattern has been consistent: Rockstar and Take-Two say very little directly, while the game's presence in the culture does the work. The Vice City signage, the Netflix premiere of An Extended Look, the GTA VI: The Album rollout with its 34 tracks and six singles, and now a wrestling promotion testing the waters on the setting's name are all part of the same swelling noise. Some of it is deliberate. Some of it, like this filing, is just other companies reacting to the gravity of the launch.
Two things are firmly confirmed here. WWE filed for the Vice City trademark on August 8, 2026, and that application is now abandoned as of September 21. IGN, Fightful, and Insider Gaming all report the same sequence.
What is not confirmed is why WWE made the filing, why it was dropped, or whether Rockstar ever sent a letter about it. There is no reporting that Rockstar opposed the application, and no statement from WWE explaining the decision. Anyone telling you Rockstar "killed" the trademark is guessing.
The honest takeaway is that this is a curiosity rather than a legal storm. The name of GTA VI's setting briefly sat in a federal filing system under someone else's name, and then it did not. For fans, the useful signal is the one this entire season keeps repeating: GTA VI is now big enough that unrelated industries are organizing around it before it ships. Wrestling found that out the cheap way. The application is dead, the launch date is unchanged, and Rockstar still has not said a word about any of it.