Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Testimonials

"It was really early. I think I was like in the second or third grade. It was definitely not the age I was supposed to play that game. I was really young right, I didn’t really understand the game play and the tasks and missions were really hard. Mainly what I really did was explore in the sandbox side of the game. It was too tough for me, so I generally would get a bunch of cheats and I would use them to explore. It was really fun! I was running around and shooting people. The most memorable memory was using the chainsaw. Until one day my dad caught me playing the game. He didn’t understand so he even helped me print out the cheats, but then he saw the fact that I was using a chainsaw and he got really mad. He tried to stop me from playing but I continued to play. My parents had a really long talk with me about not playing that game and I didn’t listen. I kinda feel bad that I played that game when I was that young. Now my play style has changed. I don’t want to harm any NPCs and I want to get the best ending. As a kid I thought it was fun to crash cars and chase people. If my play style was chaotic neutral back then it is probably the opposite now. GTA was all violence and also single player so I’m basically virtually god, especially with the cheat code thing. The reason I played GTA like that is when I was even younger I saw my cousin play Vice City like that. That’s the way they played it and it probably affected the way I played it. They didn’t do the missions at all. They would just try to get the helicopters and tanks called on them."

"In San Andreas one of the most memorable things for me is the first scene. There’s an alley and a bike there and every day I would do the process. I would do a jump and get on the bike and stop on the street and rob someone’s car. That’s generally how it would start and its very memorable. I started it hundreds of times and it’s very memorable. I don’t know why I never got tired of it but I never got tired of it."

"I know I shouldn’t have been playing it for my age but I was 13 I think. It was very different from the other games I had been playing before. I think this was the first free-world, open-world game I played. You can do almost whatever you can think of. There is no structure, it is just “this is the world, go roam around.” It was liberating. I’d say it was a role-playing game, third-person. I would call it open-world because, like I said, the whole map of San Andreas is for you to roam around and if you choose to you can go for certain missions. If not, you can roam around freely, take a car, go to the countryside, go to the beach, you can do whatever you want. Of course, you can hit people, steal people’s cars too."

"When I was younger, as in the first time I encountered the game, I think I preferred the missions because all I cared about was “Oh this car looks cool, let me just take it and go for a spin. What happens if I put the car in the river? Or what if I try to drive the car into the beach and see what happens. So there were a lot of things I was trying out when I was young. But I’ve played this game at multiple stages of my life and over the years I think the last time I played I only focused on the story because the story was pretty interesting. Then I got to know that this was even more deep than I thought it was. Just to add on, I am not from the American culture so this game was kind of a gateway for me to experience. I'm not sure what time period in which San Andreas is set, I think it's the early 2000s or late 1990s. I’m not sure, but it was more immersive. And also San Andreas is modeled after Los Angeles. They have three cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. It's modeled after the three cities. I had never been to the U.S. when I was playing it. When I came to the U.S. I got to visit all the three cities San Andreas was based on. It was so surreal to see what I saw in the game in person. And that is why San Andreas is at the top of my nostalgic game list, because I saw the world that I saw on my PC back in my hometown, in person. I think that adds to it a lot, since I could actually visit the place it made it more close to my heart."

"Since you mentioned missions, there was a hard one which I remember I was stuck on for a long time. I still remember the mission name. It's called “The Wrong Side of the Tracks.” I think it is around the halfway point of the game. The mission is pretty simple. Your job is to drive a motorbike and catch up to a train which is going at a higher speed than you. For some reason I found the mission so difficult when I was young. I watched a lot of youtube tutorials and walkthroughs on how to do it and still I ended up failing it."

"I don’t remember the name but it is a dance mission. You have to go dance according to the moves that show up on the screen. It's just you have to press the right key at the right time, nothing complicated, but for that age it was so difficult. Maybe the instructions weren’t clear, maybe I couldn’t understand the accent, or whatever, but it was hard back then."

"In San Francisco, which is San Fierro in the game, there is a street which winds down, it is the world’s steepest street. It's called Lombard street. I remember looking at the street in the game, it was fun driving a car down that street in the game because it was so steep. Also the trams, of course. In San Francisco you have the trams in the middle of the road. I was like “Why is there a tram in the middle of the road?” That didn’t make sense to me when I was young. But watching them all in person I thought “oh, this was true! They based it off of the real San Francisco.” Also the Golden Gate Bridge. I got to see it after driving through it and jumping on it in the game. I was able to see it in person. And the Hollywood sign in L.A. was called Vinewood. They had the same sign up in the hills but it was Vinewood. Also the China Palace Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. There was a mission that surrounded the theater so that was really fun to see in person. Las Vegas was so one-to-one modeling with all the major buildings in the Las Vegas strip. There is a mission in San Andreas where you do a heist in the Bellagio casino. They had the same name and the same branding, I think they had some deal with the casino. I’ve been to the building in person and it was so surreal."

"Music was a huge part of San Andreas. I’m an international student. Growing up I was only exposed to my regional musical. They had this thing where whenever you got into a car or motorbike the radio would switch on automatically. Then you would hear all the RJs talking about stuff. Of course those were fake, but it's kind of hilarious to listen to them. There’s this one song that I still remember. I only knew it from the game because it plays on the radio. A lot of songs remind me of it. I remember All My Exes Live in Texas and One Step Forward and Two Steps Back. I used to listen to the soundtracks to San Andreas and Need for Speed Most Wanted."