Five years ago Carl Johnson escaped from the pressures of life in Los Santos, San Andreas - a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs, and corruption. Where film stars and millionaires do their best to avoid the dealers and gangbangers. Now, it's the early 1990s. Carl's got to go home. His mother has been murdered, his family has fallen apart and his childhood friends are all heading toward disaster. On his return to the neighbourhood, a couple of corrupt cops frame him for homicide. CJ is forced on a journey that takes him across the entire state of San Andreas, to save his family and to take control of the streets.
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In the Strangers and Freaks mission 'The Last One', Franklin meets a hunter who claims he's been chasing a Sasquatch for nine years. That's a deliberate reference to GTA: San Andreas, released exactly nine years before GTA V, where rumours of a Bigfoot sighting first took hold of the community.
Grab the Undead Nightmare DLC and you can genuinely track down and kill Bigfoot, a direct wink at the years of rumours that Bigfoot was hidden somewhere in GTA San Andreas. Rockstar basically decided to settle the debate by giving players the real thing, teeth and all.
Juliette Lewis was originally lined up to voice Sage, a DJ on Radio X back in San Andreas, but she passed on it because she felt the character's dialogue was too crude even for GTA. She still ended up in the series eventually, though - in GTA IV she appears as herself, hosting on Radio Broker rather than playing a fictional character.
You'd think the silent protagonist of GTA III would at least get named on screen somewhere, but nope. His name only gets confirmed years later, buried in a phone call you can overhear during San Andreas. Blink and you'll miss it.
Back in 2004, San Andreas reportedly cost around $10 million to make, and that's before marketing was even factored in. Sounds tiny by today's standards, but for the time it was one of the most ambitious budgets in gaming.
San Andreas launched just two years after Vice City, yet it packed in a map several times bigger, around 100 story missions, and a mountain of side content. For a Rockstar team working on that timeline, it's honestly kind of wild.
Young Maylay, the rapper who voiced CJ, never played the character again, but he stuck around Rockstar's orbit. He went on to host the West Coast Classics radio station in GTA V and even popped up in the Contract DLC.
The special edition PS2 release and the official soundtrack CD came with a bonus DVD containing a short film called The Introduction, built in the game's own engine. It quietly sets up plot threads that pay off later in San Fierro and Las Venturas.
During development, Rockstar apparently planned a flirtier mini-game for CJ's dates, something closer to a rhythm challenge where you'd tap keys to build up the mood. It got scaled back before release, though echoes of the idea stuck around in the finished dating system.
Wander to the area around the Gant Bridge and you'll find an in-game sign listing goofy 'bridge facts' about the crossing between San Fierro and Las Venturas. It's a tiny detail most players speed straight past without ever reading.
