GTA fans are planning one last ride. On November 18, the night before GTA 6 finally lands, players are organizing a final peaceful cruise through Los Santos. No crashes. No police chases. Just one calm lap around the map to say goodbye to GTA V.
I'd be out there with them. Once you're playing GTA 6, you're not going back to 5 for a long time. No knock on the game. That's just how a new GTA works. It buries the old one for years.
Yesterday was 22 years since San Andreas came out in North America, October 26, 2004, on the PlayStation 2. It went on to sell 27.5 million copies and became the best-selling PS2 game ever made. So before we bury V and move on, I need to say the thing I have been saying for two decades.
San Andreas was 100x the game GTA V ever was.
AH SHIT, HERE WE GO AGAIN
CJ is the true GOAT of the Grand Theft Auto series. I will argue that with anybody, anywhere. The game starts with him back home in Los Santos, broke, riding a BMX bike he basically fell off a car to get, and within minutes he drops the line everybody still quotes: "Ah shit, here we go again." There has never been a better start to a game. Some of the later games came close. Nothing matched it.
Carl Johnson came home because his mom got killed, and then the game made you live his whole climb. Three cities. Los Santos, San Fierro, Las Venturas, with countryside and desert in between that felt bigger than the cities. The map kept opening up the further you got, and every new patch of it felt like a different world.
IT PLAYED LIKE THE MOVIES WE GREW UP ON
San Andreas felt like jumping into a world built out of the best gangsta movies of the 90s. South Central. Poetic Justice. That era is in my blood, and this game dropped you right inside it and handed you the keys.
Dan Houser said the Rockstar team watched hundreds of movies to get the California feel into the game, and the ones they pointed to by name were Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society and Colors. You can see all three in it. Boyz is the neighborhood and the family holding it together. Menace is the gang wars, mean and fast and pointless. Colors is the cops who are supposed to be the answer and only make it worse.
The Menace connection runs deeper than the mood, too. MC Eiht played A-Wax in Menace II Society. In San Andreas, he is the voice of Ryder. Young Maylay, the voice of CJ, auditioned for the part reading lines out of a Menace II Society script and got the job. And Officer Tenpenny, Samuel L. Jackson sounding like the devil himself, was based on Rafael Perez, the real LAPD officer at the center of the Rampart scandal. The crooked unit Tenpenny runs, C.R.A.S.H., was a real LAPD unit. The riots that close the story are the 1992 Los Angeles riots. People who study this game also spot Juice and New Jack City in there, and I believe every bit of it. Rockstar built the game out of movies and headlines we all lived through. That's why it still feels true.
“San Andreas was 100x the game GTA V ever was.”
Moe Train
YOUR CJ LOOKED LIKE YOUR LIFE
Here is the part nobody talks about enough. CJ's body was yours to wreck or build. Live at Burger Shot and Cluckin' Bell and gorge yourself, and CJ got fat. The game showed it. His clothes fit different, people on the street commented on it, he ran out of breath faster. Hit the gym every day instead and he got jacked, and that showed too. No other game in this series has ever let your habits wear on your character's body like that.
Same with the barber. You could walk out of a barbershop in Los Santos with the cleanest cut in the city, or you could let the old man talk you into the worst haircut possible and wear that shame around town until it grew out or you paid to fix it. It was stupid. It was perfect. It was yours.
And the cars. TransFender in all three cities for paint, wheels and nitrous. Loco Low Co. in Willowfield if you wanted hydraulics on a lowrider, and there was a whole bounce competition at the car meet where you hopped your ride to the music for money. Wheel Arch Angels in San Fierro for the street racers. You could steal a plane off a runway, any plane, and fly it clean across the state just because you felt like it. You could fight block by block for gang territory until Grove Street ran the map. You could break into a military base in the desert chasing a jetpack, break onto a survivalist farm with The Truth to steal a combine harvester, keep girlfriends in different cities. The game never ran out of ways to waste your whole night, and I wasted hundreds of them happily.
DRIVE-BYS IN THE BOONIES, COUNTRY ON THE RADIO
The radio stations were perfect, and the DJs added a ton to the game. These were not background playlists. They were people. Julio G running Radio Los Santos like a real LA DJ, because he was one. Chuck D as Forth Right MC on Playback FM, preaching over golden age hip hop. Michael Bivins on CSR 103.9. George Clinton as The Funktipus on Bounce FM. Axl Rose, half asleep and fully bitter, as Tommy "The Nightmare" Smith on K-DST. The DJs talked over the records, argued with callers, reacted to what was happening in the story. The whole state felt lived in because the radio never shut up.
And then there was K-Rose. Mary-Beth Maybell out of Bone County, spinning Hank Williams, Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline. You would be out in the middle of nowhere in that game, dirt roads, farms, not a streetlight for miles, doing something awful, and the car radio is playing country music, because out in the countryside that is what the cars came with. It should not work. It worked every single time. That is San Andreas in one scene. Gang war in Los Santos in the morning, Conway Twitty in the boonies by dark.
V SHOWED YOU LOS SANTOS. SAN ANDREAS MADE YOU LIVE THERE
GTA V is a monster of a game. Three playable characters, a map you can get lost in, an online mode that printed money for a decade. I know the numbers and I know the records it broke. None of that is the argument.
V gave us Los Santos the postcard. San Andreas gave us a life. Nobody quotes V's stock market. Everybody still yells "all we had to do was follow the train, CJ" like it happened to them personally. The eating, the gym, the haircuts, the respect, the stuff people laughed at in 2004 is the stuff nobody has shut up about since. The game trusted you to go find the fun instead of pointing at it with a marker, and it was right.
TAKE THE LAST RIDE
So yes, take the cruise on November 18. Take the lap, take the pictures, and put V on the shelf with some love. GTA 6 lands November 19, Rockstar's announced date, and I am going in like everybody else. First night in Leonida, volume up, no leaks, no spoilers.
But I have one question I can't shake, and it is the whole reason I wrote this. Will GTA 6 live up to it? It looks great, but will the storyline carry it like San Andreas did? CJ carried a whole state on his back inside one story. That is the bar, and it has been the bar for 22 years.
San Andreas forever. Agree or disagree, you know where I stand.
Moe Train Games covers GTA 6 every week from here to launch, and after.
Source: Wikipedia: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, development and influences
