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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San Andreas takes its name straight from the real San Andreas Fault, the earthquake-prone line running through California that the game's fictional state sits on. Rockstar even wove it into the world itself, with San Fierro showing quake damage and in-game news reports referencing tremors.
In June 2005, a Dutch modder found a disabled sex scene still sitting in the game's files and released a fix to switch it back on, calling it Hot Coffee. It spread fast, and within weeks Rockstar was staring down a full-blown industry crisis rather than just a modding curiosity.
The fallout from Hot Coffee got so big that the ESRB stripped the game's rating, major retailers pulled it entirely, and Senator Hillary Clinton pushed legislation targeting the games industry off the back of it. Rockstar eventually patched the content out for good, a fix fans nicknamed 'Cold Coffee.'
One of San Andreas's biggest casting coups was landing Samuel L. Jackson to voice Officer Frank Tenpenny, the corrupt cop who hounds CJ through most of the story. Oddly enough, Jackson has barely ever spoken publicly about taking the role.
Frank Tenpenny's character is widely believed to be modeled on Rafael Perez, the real LAPD officer at the center of the Rampart corruption scandal, right down to a passing resemblance to another officer implicated alongside him. It gives the story's villain an uncomfortable grounding in something that actually happened.
MC Eiht, frontman of Compton's Most Wanted, lent his voice to Ryder, the unpredictable Grove Street member who ends up betraying the crew. Fittingly, Ryder's look is widely thought to be inspired by the late Eazy-E.
Gangsta rap pioneer Ice-T voiced Madd Dogg, the fading rap star whose career CJ accidentally wrecks early on before eventually helping put back together. It's a nice bit of stunt casting, given Ice-T basically lived through the era the character is parodying.
San Andreas was the first game in the series to give its protagonist actual RPG-style body stats, letting CJ bulk up, slim down, or let himself go depending on how the player fed and exercised him. It's a system the series never fully brought back in later entries.
Scattered across the map are fifty collectible oysters, and hunting down every single one doesn't just unlock an achievement-style reward, it also maxes out CJ's lung capacity and sex appeal stats in one go. A nice payoff for the kind of completionist who checks every rock along the coastline.
San Andreas quietly introduced a weapon proficiency system, where sticking with the same gun over time made CJ noticeably more accurate and stable with it. It's the kind of mechanic that later open-world games leaned on heavily, but San Andreas had it running back in 2004.
