Shitzu Squalo

The Shitzu Squalo is the Ultimate Edition's boat, docked at [Washington Beach](/wiki/map/washington-beach) with a weapons crate containing explosives on board.

Squalo is Italian for shark, and the name has been on Rockstar speedboats since the 2002 game.

Boats matter in this game in a way they never have before

Grand Theft Auto has always had boats and has rarely needed them. Leonida changes that. The story starts in the Leonida Keys, where the water is the road and the smuggling economy runs on hulls. Grassrivers is navigable wetland. Vice City has water on multiple sides.

A fast boat with a weapons crate on it is a working vehicle in that geography, not a novelty parked at a marina.

There is a second reason it matters here, and it has nothing to do with the water itself. The wanted system is built on witnesses, cameras and physical evidence, and open water is the one surface in the game with none of those on it. Whether Rockstar has modelled that is unknown. The geography invites it.

The boat it is pretending to be

Offshore powerboats are to Miami what muscle cars are to Los Angeles, and the association is not an accident of styling.

The go-fast boat became the signature vessel of the Florida drug trade around the turn of the eighties for an unglamorous reason: it outran what the authorities had. Hulls designed for offshore racing, built a few miles up the coast from the water they were used on, turned out to be very good at crossing open sea quickly with something heavy aboard. The response eventually involved buying faster boats, which is how an arms race in pleasure craft happens.

Television then did the rest, and the genre Vice City has always been in reverse-engineered its entire look from that period. A white deck boat against a Miami skyline is one of about four images the whole thing is built on.

What the shots show

A white deck boat with a low windscreen and the Squalo name on the flank. The official set also puts it to non-criminal use: one shot has somebody fishing off the back with a dolphin surfacing alongside, which fits the water sports and diving activity Rockstar has shown in the Keys.

That pairing is deliberate. The same vehicle is photographed as a smuggling tool and as a fishing platform, which is roughly how the real ones were sold and exactly how the Keys economy has always worked.

Shitzu

Shitzu is Rockstar's Japanese manufacturer, better known across the series for motorcycles than for hulls. Putting the badge on a speedboat is consistent with how the studio builds its brands: a maker covers a category the way a real one does, across vehicle types that share nothing but a badge and a design language.

What is not known

No speed or handling detail has been published. Rockstar has not said what the weapons crate contains beyond explosives, whether it restocks, whether other boats carry storage in the same way, or whether the Squalo is available outside the Ultimate Edition.