RUMOR: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories for the PSP revealed?

Source: The now-defunct Web site www.vicecitystories.com.

The official story: Rockstar reps did not return requests for comment.

What we heard: Given that it is prompting many people to buy a PSP just so they can play it, the success of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is pretty much a foregone conclusion. So it stands to reason that its developer, Rockstar Leeds, is tossing around ideas for a sequel. Since LCS shares the same setting as Grand Theft Auto III, the next PSP GTA will probably take place in the eponymous setting of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

For about four bright shining hours this week, it looked like that was the case when a site surfaced at www.vicecitystories.com. Consisting of a simple black page with the VCS logo and the words "Coming 2006 to PSP," it looked very similar to both the teaser pages for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and LCS. Problem was, the site looked too similar. The fact it urged visitors to preorder the game over a year before its release raised some serious red flags. Traditionally, Rockstar has waited until around five or six months before each GTA's release to bring its Web site online.

Sure enough, within hours of going up, the site--which was registered anonymously through DomainsByProxy.com--went down. But was it legit? No way, according to Gtaportable.com, which reports the URL is actually owned by Neil Christie, the British proprietor of the Gtapsp.com fan site. That theory grows a lot more sound when one looks at Christie's personal Web site, which shows he has nice sideline, cybersquatting GTA-related URLs. But the most damning evidence came from Christie himself, who allegedly told Gtaportable.com that he threw the site up "just to fool people."

(Author's note to Neil Christie: I want the 54 minutes of my life that it took to write up this rumor back.)

Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus, although it's probable that the next PSP GTA will be set in Vice City.