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's map dwarfed everything the series had done before, packing in three full cities and twelve smaller towns across roughly 17 square miles of countryside. It was, by a wide margin, the biggest playground GTA had ever built up to that point.
According to DJ Pooh himself, it was his encouragement that got his friend Young Maylay to audition for the role of CJ in the first place. He talked about it years later, crediting his own enthusiasm for the series as part of what pushed his friends toward Rockstar.
Former Rockstar writer Lazlow Jones has told the story of getting a genuinely unsettling voicemail while GTA V was in development, from a woman claiming to speak for a real group of players who'd formed their own version of the Epsilon Program after tracing its lore through earlier games. What started as satire of cults had, without Rockstar ever intending it, grown a small real-world following of its own.
When Rockstar's map for GTA V leaked ahead of launch, fans worked out it clocked in at around 49 square miles, comfortably larger than San Andreas, GTA IV, and Red Dead Redemption's maps added together. For a studio that had been squeezing stories out of the same engine for years, it was a genuinely staggering jump in scale.
Vice City wasn't a standalone bet for Sony, it was the middle chapter of a three-game exclusivity package that also covered GTA III and San Andreas. Sony's own executives later admitted the whole arrangement was partly a nervous reaction to Microsoft's Xbox launching around the same time, and it ended up cementing all three as some of the best-selling PS2 games ever made.
Big Smoke, the lovable-turned-treacherous Grove Street member, was voiced by actor Clifton Powell, who also appeared in Menace II Society, one of the films that shaped San Andreas's whole tone. His delivery of lines like the drive-thru order became one of the most quoted moments in the game.
CJ's older brother Sweet, the hardline leader of the Grove Street Families, was voiced by comedian and actor Faizon Love. It's a role that leans entirely dramatic, a departure from the comedic parts he's best known for elsewhere.
Peter Fonda, famous for Easy Rider, voiced The Truth, the aging hippie and former cannabis farmer who sends CJ on increasingly bizarre errands around Flint County. It's a fittingly countercultural casting choice for a character obsessed with government conspiracies.
Mike Toreno, the shady federal agent who blackmails CJ into doing his dirty work for most of the game's back half, was voiced by James Woods. His slick, menacing line delivery makes Toreno one of the more unsettling characters in the story.
San Andreas was the first GTA game to let players strap on a fully controllable jetpack, first picked up during the mission where CJ steals it from a secret underground lab at Area 69. After that mission it respawns permanently at Verdant Meadows Airfield for players to mess around with.
