Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• 1. Introduction

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  Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a 2004 action-adventure game from Rockstar North, gave players one of the most repeated lines in gaming. Early in the story, a mission called "Wrong Side of the Tracks" goes badly, and Big Smoke shouts, "All we had to do, was follow the damn train, CJ!" The mission was so hard that his scolding became a catchphrase, and Grand Theft Auto V later referenced it. Rockstar Games published the game first for the PlayStation 2, where it became the best-selling title on the console. This documentary asks how a studio fitted three cities and the countryside between them into one game. It asks why Rockstar hunted for an unknown actor to play the lead. It also asks how a hidden minigame, buried in the code, ended up in front of regulators.

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• 2. Return To Grove Street

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  In 1992, a gangster named Carl "CJ" Johnson comes back to the city of Los Santos after five years in Liberty City. His mother has been killed in a drive-by shooting. Before he can even reach home, corrupt officers from a police unit called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, stop him. Their leader, Frank Tenpenny, threatens to blame CJ for the killing of a fellow officer unless CJ does as he is told.

  On Grove Street, CJ finds his brother Sweet, his sister Kendl, and old friends Big Smoke and Ryder. The Grove Street Families, the gang he left behind, have lost most of their territory. CJ rebuilds it by reuniting the splintered sets and allying with Cesar Vialpando, Kendl's boyfriend and the leader of the Varrios Los Aztecas gang. Then comes the blow. CJ and Cesar see Big Smoke and Ryder meeting with Tenpenny and the rival Ballas gang, and they learn that both friends were behind his mother's death.

  Sweet ends up wounded and in prison. Tenpenny sends CJ away to the countryside and makes him silence witnesses to CRASH's corruption, promising Sweet's safety in return. There CJ befriends an ageing hippie and marijuana farmer known as the Truth, and a Triad leader named Wu Zi Mu. He wins a garage in San Fierro and tracks the Loco Syndicate, the drug connection used by Big Smoke and Ryder. Its affable leader, Mike Toreno, turns out to be an undercover government agent. In Las Venturas, CJ and Wu Zi Mu open a casino, and CJ stops the rapper Madd Dogg from taking his own life before becoming his manager.

  The ending is a riot. Tenpenny is tried for several felonies, but the charges collapse for lack of witnesses, and the city erupts. CJ finds Big Smoke's hideout, wins the gunfight, and hears Smoke admit he had become obsessed with money and power. Tenpenny steals the drug money and flees in a fire truck, then loses control and crashes off a bridge overlooking Grove Street. As the party at the Johnson house carries on, CJ slips out to check on the neighbourhood.

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• 3. Rules Of The Open World

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  Between missions, the game hands CJ a state to roam, with fast travel by airport between its cities and safehouses that can be bought to save progress and store vehicles. More than 180 vehicles are on offer, from cars and motorcycles to aircraft, boats, and remote-control models. Most can be fitted with extras such as hydraulics, nitrous oxide engines, and stereo systems.

  A wanted meter in the head-up display tracks the attention of the police. Stars show the current level, and at the maximum of six, police helicopters and the military come after the player. Hide from the officers' line of sight and the meter cools down. Players who run out of health wake up at a hospital.

  Territory is won by attacking rival gang members and surviving three waves of counterattacks. Held territory must then be defended against periodic raids or it is lost. Side activities include burglary, firefighting, pimping, taxi runs, and vigilante missions, and the cash they earn buys clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, and accessories for CJ.

  The game also borrowed from role-playing games, which was new for the series. Food and exercise change CJ's body, and losing muscle weakens him in a fight. Gyms in each city teach boxing, kickboxing, and mixed martial arts. The game tracks skills such as driving, firearms handling, lung capacity, and stamina, plus the respect his friends have for him. Players can also date six different girls, taking them to dinner, drinks, dancing, or driving.

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• 4. Building The State

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  Rockstar North began work on San Andreas after finishing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in October 2002. The team imagined three separate maps joined by public transport. It ended up with a single map in which three cities are divided by countryside and desert. Los Santos drew on Los Angeles, San Fierro on San Francisco, and Las Venturas on Las Vegas.

  Early on, developers travelled to each city for research and photography. Art director Aaron Garbut felt that Los Angeles gang territory was especially hard to capture without first-hand experience. Rockstar's New York research team took thousands of photographs and hours of video, and some of that material became textures in the game. The finished world covers 36 square kilometres, about four to six times the size of the maps in Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City.

  Real places supplied specific details. Compton shaped the urban areas of Los Santos, and the Golden Gate Bridge inspired the Gant Bridge. Mountains, forests, and a desert were all firsts for the series. San Fierro's hills were meant to pull players toward driving, and the open-country driving owed a debt to Rockstar's racing game Smuggler's Run, from 2002. Garbut also gave each city its own sky: red-orange for Los Santos, blue for San Fierro, and red for Las Venturas.

  The engine was RenderWare, with a render pipeline rewritten to put 35-50% more polygons on screen. It gained real-time reflections, volumetric lighting, and separate models and lighting for day and night. Garbut said the world holds about 16,000 unique objects and buildings. Several buildings share a single low-detail model, which lets the map load as players travel without the loading screens that interrupted Vice City.

  The schedule was far kinder to the design than to the people. Development lasted about two years, compared with one for Vice City. The 50-person team grew to 75 once developers from Manhunt joined, and the testing department grew from 60 to 100. Programmer Gary Foreman feared the company had entered a "constant crunch", with some developers working 17 hours a day. Some left after disagreements with Rockstar president Sam Houser over working conditions. One long-time employee quit in protest at the company's portrayal of African Americans. Rockstar even delayed its game The Warriors from 2004 to 2005 to free up resources for San Andreas.

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• 5. Writing And Casting CJ

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  The story pulls from the Rampart scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department, the 1990s crack epidemic, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the rivalry between the Bloods and the Crips. Sam Houser said he was fascinated by how street gangs looked and terrified by how they behaved. The writers tried to portray gang violence without glorifying it, and they gave each gang its own walking style. DJ Pooh was hired to co-write from an American perspective. He, Estevan Oriol, and Mister Cartoon helped the team imitate the city's 1990s street culture.

  Film was the other textbook. Dan Houser said the team watched "hundreds of movies to get the California vibe". Boyz n the Hood, Colors, and Menace II Society fed the narrative. The countryside was compared to Deliverance, San Fierro to Bullitt, and Las Venturas to Casino. The satire, Houser said, targeted the "broader weirdness" of American consumerism and action films. The team had briefly considered settings from the 1930s to the 1950s, but found them out of step with the series.

  Sam Houser wanted an unknown actor for CJ. He had felt conflicted about Ray Liotta playing Tommy Vercetti in Vice City because he knew Liotta's earlier work too well. Rockstar asked Young Maylay to audition after overhearing him talk with DJ Pooh, and it cast him a few weeks later. It was his first acting job. Celebrities went into secondary roles, with Samuel L. Jackson as Tenpenny. Houser felt that Young Maylay's obscurity made CJ seem "very, very human". DJ Pooh compared CJ to the rapper Tupac Shakur, fiercely devoted to family but able to turn "cold-blooded" when needed.

  The cast was enormous. More than 400 actors spoke more than 60,000 lines, including over 7,700 for CJ. The game earned a Guinness World Record for the largest video game voice cast, with 861 credited actors. Recording took roughly five months, and each non-player character got around an hour of dialogue, against ten minutes in Vice City.

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• 6. The Radio Dial

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  Rockstar partnered with Interscope Records to build the soundtrack. The in-game radio carried eleven stations and twenty disc jockeys, among them Axl Rose, Chuck D, and George Clinton. It held more than three times as many licensed songs and original in-universe advertisements as Grand Theft Auto III.

  The stations also worked differently from earlier games. Where each station's audio had once simply looped, San Andreas played songs in randomised order, gave accurate weather predictions, and broadcast news announcements tied to the story. Composer Michael Hunter wrote the main theme, partly inspired by his childhood discovery of hip-hop through the television show Yo! MTV Raps.

  Interscope released two compilation albums, a two-disc set in November 2004 and an eight-disc box set the following month. The Windows, Xbox, and mobile versions later added one more station, which played a custom soundtrack of music the player imported.

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• 7. Release, Praise, Sales

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  Take-Two Interactive announced the next Grand Theft Auto in October 2003, and speculation grew when the name San Andreas was registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that December. Rockstar showed first details at E3 in May 2004, and in September a delay pushed the release to the end of October. Hand-painted advertisements went up around the world, and one in Melbourne, Australia, was still partly visible in 2020. In October 2004, hackers leaked an early version, and Rockstar promised to "aggressively pursue this matter".

  Reviewers were warm. Metacritic reported "universal acclaim" and ranked it the fifth-highest-rated PlayStation 2 game. Critic Jeremy Parish called the world "the most complete, complex and detailed environment ever crafted for a game". Complaints centred on pop-up graphics, unstable frame rates, and missions that made players drive long distances and replay long sequences after failing. Some scholars also argued the game reinforced racial stereotypes. Others, including Rachael Hutchinson, read it as a critical reflection on racial conflict in America.

  Awards followed. At the Spike Video Game Awards the game won four of five nominations, including Game of the Year. It took five prizes at the Golden Joystick Awards, with CJ named hero and Tenpenny villain. The Guardian reported that its developers walked out of the Game Developers Choice Awards after winning nothing.

  Sales were enormous. The game sold 4.5 million copies in its first week, outselling Vice City by 45%. In the United Kingdom it set the record for most copies sold over a weekend. It was the best-selling game of 2004, and it became the best-selling PlayStation 2 title, with 17.33 million units sold by 2009. By 2011, worldwide sales had reached 27.5 million.

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• 8. Hot Coffee And Legacy

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  To earn a "Mature" rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the developers cut back planned nudity and sexual scenes. They did not delete them. They made them unreachable. Modders found the code on the PlayStation 2 release, and Patrick Wildenborg worked out how to switch it on after the Windows version arrived. It let CJ have animated sex with his girlfriend. Wildenborg released the modification as "Hot Coffee", after the game's own euphemism, and it was downloaded over one million times in four weeks.

  Rockstar and Take-Two stayed mostly silent. The rating board re-rated the game "Adults Only" after an investigation, and Australia banned it until the explicit scenes were removed. The Federal Trade Commission warned both companies for failing to disclose the extent of the graphic material, and a class action lawsuit accused them of misleading buyers. The board then announced fines for developers who hid such material.

  The game's shadow fell across the series. For Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008, Rockstar chose a more focused, realistic world with fewer dead spaces. For Grand Theft Auto V in 2013, it redesigned Los Santos and dropped San Fierro and Las Venturas. Dan Houser felt that spreading across three cities had limited how well the team could capture Los Angeles. Garbut said technical limits made it feel like a "backdrop or a game level with pedestrians randomly milling about".

  The game itself kept travelling. Modders have inserted CJ into Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Street Fighter 6. Windows and Xbox versions arrived in June 2005, and a mobile port by War Drum Studios followed in December 2013. A remastered Definitive Edition shipped in November 2021. A virtual reality version for Meta's Quest 2 was announced in October 2021, but Meta said in August 2024 that it was "on hold indefinitely".

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