‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ dev debunks in-game mysteries

5 April, 2024

One of the developers who worked on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has explained the reasoning behind some of the stranger occurrences in the game.

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Taking to social media Obbe Vermeij, a former Rockstar North developer, explained why certain planes in San Andreas crashed near the player after confirming that the luck mechanic had nothing to do with it. “That’s just an urban legend”.

Vermeij went on to say that the crashes were caused by bugs in the GTA code. “I was aware of the crashes and briefly considered removing the fly-by’s altogether,” he admitted before explaining that collisions happen due to the plane’s scanner not picking up thinner objects like trees in front of them, and flying straight into them. “These scans were slow so I used the absolute minimum (Just the body and wingtips I believe),” he added.

Additionally, some planes crashed due to how they were generated, while some flightpaths were programmed before the game map was finalised. “These issues would occasionally allow planes to be created on a doomed flightpath,” said Vermeij.

In GTA San Andreas, small planes are periodically created near the player to perform a fly-by.
Sometimes they crash.

Before creating the plane, my code looks for obstacles in its path.
It scans a number of lines in the forward direction of the plane. These scans are slow so I… pic.twitter.com/8uUQcmU958

— Obbe Vermeij (@ObbeVermeij) April 2, 2024

As fans shared their encounters with the random exploding planes, Vermeij commented: “Speedrunners didn’t enjoy the crashes either,” with the unpredictable collisions ruining many an attempt.

Elsewhere in the thread, Vermeij confirmed that Big Foot doesn’t exist in the Grand Theft Auto universe, but does exist in real life, and said that San Andreas’ infamous ghost cars were caused by the car generator placing them on steep slopes, with gravity proving too much for their brakes.

He also explained why an NPC will take a photograph, before walking off a cliff to their inevitable doom, with these Lemming-like characters still a fan-favourite mystery.

“We used to have these ‘attractors’ which NPCs would use (like an atm, chair or whatever),” said Vermeij. “NPCs could also spawn there (like this photographer). Once it has done the activity it will look for a nearby node on the network and start walking around randomly. The nearest node could be far away and even across water,” he added.

Are you able to explain the suicidal photographer? Everyone thinks it's because there use to be a path of sort in front but I think it happens because of a mistake in the code. pic.twitter.com/lgYX3fll1y

— Stuart Lugsden  (@AGuyWhoTweet5) April 2, 2024