A way has been found to complete the old GTA: San Andreas in the PC version in less than an hour.
In the old GTA: San Andreas there’s a glitch, and then a trick to exploit that glitch to skip a good chunk of the game. In the speedrunning community, that trick is called AJS iliti “Arbitrary Jump Script” and was discovered in 2019. In short, by performing a very specific set of actions within the game, players can force the game to transfer them to the final mission. And this is achieved without any cheat codes or external tools.
Until recently, the AJS trick was only available in the Windows Store version of the game and in the Definitive Edition remaster. That is, the glitch has always been available in the original PC version of San Andreas, it just took more than 20 years for speedrunners to discover an insane sequence of actions that can make San Andreas go to the very endgame.
The whole procedure consists of a series of actions with about 30 steps and includes the use of various glitches that Rockstar has never patched. When all that is planned is done, San Andreas can be completed in less than an hour.
And of course someone has already done it. One Russian man managed to finish the game two days ago 53 minutes and 46 secondsthereby setting a new world record for the fastest crossing of San Andreas. The previous record, without using the AJS trick, is 2 hours, 56 minutes and 56 seconds.
Here’s what that transition looked like:
Before you start commenting that this is nonsense and that there is no fun, it should be pointed out that discovering this glitch and trick in a 22-year-old game gave speedrunners more fun than countless GTA San Andreas passes without a race against time. It’s fascinating that after 22 years of the game’s existence, something like this was discovered at all.