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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As of 2008, Guinness World Records recognized San Andreas as having both the largest in-game soundtrack and the largest voice cast of any video game up to that point. It held the soundtrack crown until GTA IV came along with 218 licensed tracks to San Andreas's 156.
When the Hot Coffee content came to light, Australia's Attorney-General opened an investigation, and on 29 July 2005 the game actually lost its rating entirely, meaning it couldn't legally be sold there. Rockstar had to submit a cleaned-up version a few months later to get it back on shelves.
Almost as soon as the game launched, players convinced themselves Bigfoot was hiding somewhere in the countryside near Back o' Beyond, and the rumor refused to die for years. Rockstar's own co-founder eventually shot it down publicly, though that didn't stop people from combing the woods with in-game cameras looking for him.
San Andreas got spoofed in an episode of Die Redaktion, a monthly comedy segment made by the German gaming magazine GameStar, which shipped on the DVD bundled with one of their 2005 issues. A funny little reminder of how far the game's cultural footprint reached.
In the horse racing mini-game, one entrant is literally named 'Henrik's Jaw,' a nod to Celtic striker Henrik Larsson breaking his jaw around the time the game was in development. Sitting right next to it on the roster is a horse cheekily named after the Scotland national team's habit of crashing out of tournaments early, a joke that only really lands if you know Rockstar North is based in Scotland.
Rockstar toyed with letting players switch between multiple playable characters way back during San Andreas, but the hardware of the era just couldn't handle it. The idea got shelved for nearly a decade until GTA V finally pulled it off with Michael, Franklin, and Trevor.
The art team photographed real Los Angeles neighborhoods extensively during development, and a lot of those photos ended up baked directly into the game's textures. Halfway through production the New York studio even went back to double-check every reference to keep the recreation accurate.
Producer and writer DJ Pooh personally drove Rockstar's team around Los Angeles to soak up the culture that shaped the game's early-90s setting. One voice actor later described him as the crew's direct line to the people who actually lived that world.
Long before Shawn Fonteno became the voice and face of Franklin Clinton in GTA V, he already had a foot in the door on San Andreas, voicing a recruitable gang member called Fam1 and a handful of other background characters.
Everyone assumes the Gant Bridge is a Golden Gate clone, and it is, but the Garver Bridge over in the same area is actually modeled on the Forth Road Bridge near Edinburgh. Makes sense once you remember a big chunk of the dev team was working out of Scotland.
