Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is 22 years old, which as you can imagine means that people have cracked that game wide open with weird glitches, skips, and tricks. Over the years, speedrunners have found ways to break San Andreas that got an any% speedrun of it down to a little under three hours, but recently an absolutely buckwild bug was found that cut that time down even further, to under an hour. Buckle up, folks, because this is one heck of a wacky speedrun.
First, some context. San Andreas has been broken and rebroken many times over the years across its multiple versions, and there’s one specific “trick” that’s upended the speedrunning landscape multiple times. It actually originated in GTA: Vice City, where a trick known as Script Stack Underflow (SSU) was found that chopped an any% run down to around eight minutes. Way back in 2019, San Andreas runners found something similar that they called “Arbitrary Jump in Script”, or AJS, specifically in the Window Store remaster of the game. This overly-complex trick essentially let speedrunners jump straight to the end of the game by doing a long series of very specific things such as killing a drug dealer, parking a bike in a very specific place, answering the phone at very specific times, and diligently avoiding vending machines at all costs.
While involved, it demonstrably worked, with the end result being the game executing a “JUMP” command to the start of End of the Line Part 3, the final mission. Ever since then the speedrunning community has had to split the category into any% and any% no AJS, because watching a run with AJS is fun exactly once and then you really just want to watch a proper, action-packed, multi-hour San Andreas speedrun. For a long time, this skip was limited to the Windows Store version of the game, though it was later found in the Definitive Edition remaster with some significant setup differences.
Well now, speedrunners have figured out how to do AJS in the original PC version of San Andreas. It is also completely different in how it’s set up, and is somehow even wackier than any of the versions that have come before. u/Vitosi4ek on Reddit has a really nice breakdown of all the steps involved (though some runners have already found ways to smooth out certain bits of it). These include: winning $10,000 on horse betting, making a clone of yourself, doing stunt jumps on a superbike, betting in the casino with negative money, changing your clothes, doing a dance minigame, running two Mission at the exact same time, and a lot more. All of this will hopefully, if the game doesn’t crash, send you to the start of End of the Line Part 3, and let you finish the game right there.
This glitch was literally just discovered, and in that time the world record run for an any% of GTA: San Andreas has dropped down to 53 minutes and 46 seconds by creezyful. It’s very likely that this time will get even more shaved off in the coming days and weeks as speedrunners continue to optimize. This has also resulted in the community splitting any% off from any% no AJS, so audiences can still enjoy a roughly three-hour run of San Andreas and all the hyjinks involved in that.
It’s wildly impressive to me that people are still managing to crack games this old open even more than they’ve already been, and make their guts do ridiculous things. Just this past AGDQ, I watched someone run arbitrary code execution in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, something I’m pretty sure they didn’t know how to do the last time the game was at the show. Video games, man!
Unfortunately, that does mean it’ll probably be a long time before we get a run of GTA 6 that goes that fast. And that’s if we can even make it to launch day this November.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
