Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Actor Allusion:
    • Axl Rose is the DJ of the classic rock station in San Andreas. He mocks the modern/Grunge rock station, which includes his song "Welcome to the Jungle" in the rotation.
    • Chris Penn, known for playing Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, plays Officer Eddie Pulaski.
  • Bad Export for You: Since German politicians are extremely touchy with the subject of violence in video games, the German version of this game had to undergo some censorship. Some of the changes are only visual (people don't get mutilated by headshots anymore, for example), but there are changes that directly affect gameplay as well. Most infuriating is probably the fact that people don't drop money anymore when killed, which effectively robs the player of one source of income.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!: Where to begin? It is as much fun playing "spot the superstar" here as you did in Grand Theft Auto Vice City.
    • Ryder is voiced by MC Eiht (fans will recognize his "g'yeah").
    • Faizon Love -- Big Worm from Friday) -- is your brother Sweet.
    • Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Penn play the villains Officers Tenpenny and Pulaski respectively.
    • Peter Fonda is The Truth, David Cross is Zero, James Woods is Mike Toreno, Ice-T is Madd Dogg.
    • The DJ for the Classic Rock station (K-DST) is voiced by Axl Rose, who often takes shots at the heavy metal/grunge station Radio X. Radio X plays Welcome to the Jungle.
    • Chuck D of Public Enemy fame as "Forthright MC" on Playback FM and Motherfunking George Clinton himself as "The Funktopus" on Bounce FM. There are no Parliament/Funkadelic tracks in the game, but Bounce FM features a melody of many songs by the P-Funk collective, and sometimes, in the outro to "Rebel Without A Pause" Chuck D says "now Public Enemy is a group I have always been behind!". The meta here is sickening.
    • And Michael Bivins of New Edition and Bell Biv Devoe as the DJ of the new jack swing station CSR.
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes:
    • Following the infamous Hot Coffee sex scandal, the first edition was pulled out of circulation, with a recall being issued towards owners of the initial retail 1.0 release (not that fans actually bothered to have their copies sent back to R* though). Subsequent releases of the game are now patched to remove most if not all traces of the scene in question; they can however be downgraded to version 1.0 which is mandatory for any and all modifications to work.
    • And for a time, Rockstar made the brilliant decision of delisting the classic RenderWare-powered releases of San Andreas and the earlier two installments to make way for the Definitive Edition remasters, leading to concerns about video game preservation and consumer choice. They later backed off as player backlash over the remasters' dubious quality became glaringly obvious in late 2021.
  • Throw It In: The random plane crashes were a glitch Rockstar discovered during beta testing, due to a spawned plane's randomly set trajectory sometimes intersecting with the ground. They found the crashes so funny and appropriate for the comedic Crapsack World setting that they left the glitch alone.
  • Troubled Production: A series of emails with Dan Houser revealed his insistence on getting the Hot Coffee minigame incorporated into San Andreas, as detailed in a Eurogamer article. Fellow Rockstar staff members warned Houser of the potential implications of adding explicit sexual content into the game, such as lost sales, limited marketing and being refused from having a console release (video game console manufacturers have made it a point not to license AO-rated video games on their devices, hence why otherwise AO-rated games were edited to secure a console release), to which Houser acquiesced and had the problematic scenes disabled as removing them altogether could break the game, claiming that the minigame was deeply interwoven into the game's code. Feeling incensed and betrayed by the apparent injustice of the situation, Houser would then express his displeasure with the perceived double standards when it comes to sex in video games in an email, saying, "Can we confirm that these are the content changes that need to be made? As I mentioned to Terry [Donovan, then CEO of Rockstar Games], I was pretty shocked by the list. The cuts are everywhere. It doesn't feel like we are pushing any boundaries now. Why bother? I really, really do not want to change this stuff. It feels SO wrong at the behest of psychotic, mormon [sic], capitalist retailers."
  • Urban Legend of Zelda: Persistent rumors had it that Bigfoot is in the woods somewhere. It is a mod, and not a very visually impressive one at that. Similar rumors, disproven, held that it's possible to find aliens wandering the desert around Area 69 and Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre around The Panopticon. Another rumor involving the woods is the odd beat-up cars found in the Back O' Beyond, dubbed the "ghost cars", due to one of them rolling down a hill upon spawning, spooking some players.
  • Los Santos was re-imagined and revisited in Grand Theft Auto V.
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