GAME · 2004
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- Platforms
- PlayStation 3, Windows Phone, Microsoft Windows, macOS
129 archived facts 7 topics 2 sources Last reviewed Sep 2026
27 Facts From the Development of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- #002
Rockstar North started work on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas once Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had shipped in October 2002.
- #004
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was made over two years, twice the one-year span of Vice City, which gave the team room to experiment and reassess earlier entries in the series.
- #006
Producer Leslie Benzies said he wanted Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to redefine the series and to "revolutionize open-ended gameplay and video game production values".
- #007
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was developed on a budget of less than US$10 million.
- #009
Rockstar North's low staff turnover since the 1997 release of the series' first game, Grand Theft Auto, let the team draw on its accumulated experience while making Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
- #011
During development of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, some Rockstar developers worried about working conditions because they had not been given an adequate break following Vice City.
- #013
Programmer Gary Foreman feared Rockstar had entered a "constant crunch" while Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was in development, with some developers working 17-hour days.
- #015
Some developers left Rockstar after disagreements with president Sam Houser over working conditions, and one long-time employee quit in objection to the company's portrayal of African Americans and what he saw as a gloomier, more exploitative tone in its games, particularly Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Manhunt.
- #016
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was initially planned as three separate maps joined by public transport, but the design became a single map containing three cities divided by countryside and desert.
- #018
The three cities of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas drew on real locations: Los Santos on Los Angeles, San Fierro on San Francisco and Las Venturas on Las Vegas.
- #023
Rockstar North's ability to imitate 1990s Los Angeles street culture in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was helped by the studio's relationship with Los Angeles natives Estevan Oriol, Mister Cartoon and DJ Pooh, according to Benzies.
- #025
For Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, real locations guided the design of in-game areas, with Compton informing Los Santos's urban districts and the Golden Gate Bridge serving as the basis for the Gant Bridge.
- #026
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas introduced mountains, forests and a desert to the series, features the Rockstar North team was enthusiastic about including.
- #028
Garbut gave each city in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas its own climate zone, distinguished by sky colour: red-orange for Los Santos, blue for San Fierro and red for Las Venturas.
- #030
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was built on the RenderWare game engine, with its render pipeline rewritten to support greater graphical detail and scope. The changes allowed 35–50% more polygons on screen, real-time reflections and volumetric lighting, and separate models and lighting for day and night, including full shadows for stealth sequences.
- #032
According to Garbut, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas's world is constructed from roughly 16,000 unique objects and buildings. Some buildings reuse a single low-detail model so they can load as players move across the map without the loading screens seen in Vice City.
- #033
Contains a major spoiler — show
When CJ sees that Big Smoke and Ryder have betrayed him, he reacts only to Smoke; this is because Ryder was never meant to be a traitor, but his voice actor quit in the middle of development, so Rockstar Games had to make him a traitor and kill off the character.
- #034
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas's driving physics were reworked from earlier games in the series because of the game's more open areas. Its stealth elements were inspired by Manhunt, and the targeting and gun gameplay of Manhunt was adapted to the open world formula.
- #036
Computer scripting advancements let the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas developers add gameplay features that had not been possible in their previous games, such as casino minigames. The game's action sequences were crafted as an extension of the team's favourite moments from Vice City.
- #039
Sam Houser was fascinated by the appearances of street gangs and terrified by their behaviour, and the writers of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sought to portray gang violence accurately without glorifying it.
- #041
DJ Pooh was hired to co-write Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from an American perspective, and the writers wanted each gang to act differently, signified by unique walking styles.
- #043
Dan Houser said the team behind Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas watched hundreds of movies to get the California vibe, referencing Boyz n the Hood (1991), Colors (1988) and Menace II Society (1993) for narrative inspiration.
- #045
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas completed a loosely connected trilogy of Grand Theft Auto games spanning the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, and the team deliberately avoided an "ultimate bad guy" to keep the games loosely connected.
- #047
The team behind Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas initially considered settings such as the 1930s to 1950s but rejected them as incongruous with the series, and felt that 1990s California, where the world's attention was focused on news and music, translated well to the game.
- #060
Rockstar worked with Interscope Records on the soundtrack for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Interscope released two compilation albums tied to the game: a two-disc album in November 2004 and an eight-disc box set in December.
- #066
Michael Hunter composed the main theme of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, drawing in part on his childhood exposure to hip-hop through Yo! MTV Raps (1988–1995).
- #088
Tommy Vercetti, the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), was planned to return in this entry. However, after Rockstar North's dispute with Ray Liotta, these plans were cancelled and Tommy is only briefly mentioned in the "The Meat Business" mission, during the confrontation between Ken Rosenberg and Carl "CJ" Johnson at the Sindacco Abattoir.
Sources & editorial notes
Sources for the entries on this page
- IMDb IMDb kaydı
- Wikipedia Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas — Wikipedia
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work