GTA San Andreas Turns 20

Sat 26 Oct 2024, 23:59

Well, I guess I'm getting old because I remember when the game came out. I'm also getting old because I just realized that its this games 20th birthday at 23:30, so I only have an half hour to write this! Let's see how many memories I can put down in that amount of time!

• I remember how one of my friends were playing it first on their PS2 and I had to wait for it to get on PC, so I would go over there a lot for the next six months or so. But it eventually did release on PC and me and my brother hastily acquired something that had HOODLUM in its name and that would be a staple for years to come (and still is!)

• In the meantime of me not having PC version, I remember my friend sometimes streaming the game over webcam over MSN which was horrible quality, but I still enjoyed watching him play it. There was no sound either.

• First memory I have of the game is Ryder's "Keep up motherfucker!" line in the very first mission of the game. I was so scared when I first heard that, because we were playing with speakers and I was deathly afraid my mother would hear it and not let me play it anymore (I was 9 at the time!), but fortunately she did not hear it, at least not that time.

• I remember making a deal with my mother that I would only drive cars in this game and do nothing criminal. Obviously that was a big crock of shit. As soon as she went away I would go killing people again, and then whenever she peeked in I would be a law abiding citizen. Ah... youth...

• I remember my brother not liking the game. I don't think he could adjust to the gangster setting. He really liked GTA 3 and Vice City, but I think gangster stuff was not his vibe. Even to this day I don't think he ever played the game again. I remember he unlocked the gym (which is early on), maxed out the Stamina and Muscle stats, so I'm pretty sure he just did that and has never touched the game again.

• My first computer was a COMPAQ that my brother slightly modified for me. I think it had an Intel Celeron at 2.5 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB IDE HDD and a Geforce Ti 4440? Very unsure about the GPU model. Eitherway, I remember that computer had an issue with the game when it would rain: it would make all the sound go away, which was really annoying. I remember it being specifically annoying when I was out in the Badlands because it would frequently rain there.

• I had a friend, who didn't really do anything in this game except mod cars. He always went for the flames paint jobs.

• I remember I had another friend, who was my best friend at the time. We spent like an entire summer playing this game, trying to 100% it individually. He would come over with his PS2, and he would play on that and I would play on my PC. We did not use a checklist from the internet, so we just imagined on our own what is needed for 100%, so we ended up doing a ton of unnecessary stuff like dating all girlfriends and getting all unique stunt jumps (actually, only he did that, I have yet to this day complete all unique stunt jumps! I've 100%ed the game more than once but never gotten all USJs... I should probably do that some day...). In the end, neither of us got 100%. He got the closest at 85% (I still have his memory card with the save file from 2006...)

• I once tried going for 100% on the Xbox version. And I remember playing it a shit ton, I think I was around 97%. I think the only things I had left was the quarry misions and Taxi missions. Not sure why I never finished it or what happened to the save file... It probably got wiped at some point when I was messing with modding my Xbox.

• One of my earliest threads on SpeedDemosArchive is about making a 100% run for this game. I'm pretty sure I lied about how I had 100%ed the game many times. I also remember asking my mom how much it would cost to ship a bunch of video tapes to the US. I think I did one segment, and as I had never 100%ed the game I followed some guide on GameFAQs, which started of with doing the LS Courier mission. So I have a VHS recording of that somewhere I'm pretty sure.

• I remember in 2006 my mom was opening a new little business (a little convenience store thing). She was moving a bunch of furniture over there and I would get on my bike and ride after them. Unfortunately I was a bit too fast on a bit of gravely road and so I fell and got a nice scar in my arm. My mom and dad was busy moving the furniture so they couldn't check on me, but my aunt did instead, and so she took me back home and cleaned up the scar and whatever and put a nice big band-aid on it. Then she went away and I went to my room and played the Madd Dogg mission on my PS2 on my CRT.

• I remember selling my CIB copies of Paper Mario 64 and Mario Party 3 to finance a PS2 and a copy of the game. I regret this horribly in hindsight because those two games (especially PAL copies!) are some of the most expensive N64 games nowadays.

• The flight school was the bane of our existence growing up, especially Destroy Targets. Both me and all my friends struggled with it. Eventually I got kinda good at it and could finish it for my friends, but before that we had to consult with my brothers friend and have him do it for us. Not sure why we struggled so much, I find it very easy nowadays.

• Similarily all of my friends struggled with the low-rider and dancing missions, but I was great at them, so they always asked me to come over to their house to finish those missions for them. I remember when we discovered Life's A Beach was much harder on the PS2 version because it required 4000 points, while on PC it only required 2500, so I would brag like "oh yeah I can finish that mission... even on the PS2 ;)"

• I remember a guy in my class. He had a heart problem, which prevented him from going into the pool when we had swim class, so he would just sit on a chair and watch us (seems cruel in retrospect...). Eitherway, I remember during one of these swim classes, I would swim up next to his edge of the pool and talk with him (I was in the pool hanging by the edge, he was on a chair), and he mentioned that he couldn't figure out how to do the low-rider dancing mission because he didn't know how to make the car dance. So I told him you use the numpad on PC to move it and that lit up a lightbulb in his head and the next day he mentioned that it worked and he now just has to get good at it. I hope that guy's doing well, haven't seen or heard about him in ages.

• I still remember vividly the day I made one the first "single segment" speedrun of this game. Me and my friends were having a LAN party in my bedroom (I have no idea how we fit 3 computers + 3 people in there but we sure did) and it was the second day, and I just felt like playing San Andreas and recording it for some reason. Before I knew it, I had made a single long recording of the game from New Game to San Fierro. Did not know I was making history at the time (that run also aged horribly, because I said something like "I dont think anyone is ever gonna make a full game single-segment speedrun of this game"... there are millions of those nowadays!)

Well, 5 minutes to go so I better wrap this up.

Happy birthday GTA San Andreas! This game is the source of many of my best gaming memories, and just memories in general, because I grew up with this game. I played it a shit ton during my younger years, so it feels like it's been part of me growing up, it's my childhood and teenage years. All the friends I played this game with, all the memories of those friends, all the speedrunning memories... I just have a ton of many good memories with this game, and I will continue to enjoy them. Maybe I'll write more of them in 10 years?