A wild new speedrunning skip has been discovered in GTA: San Andreas' original PC port, you know, the one that only came out a mere 21 years ago.
With any game as old and popular as San Andreas, there have of course been countless glitches and odd tricks and convoluted skips discovered in the decades since its release. But just this week, an absolutely absurd 30-ish step skip was unearthed that lets you beat the classic open worlder in under an hour.
As Redditor Vitosi4ek nicely explains, San Andreas' Windows Store remaster was broken wide open a couple years ago thanks to something called the Arbitrary Jump in Script (AJS) skip. Explaining the entire skip would sound like a fever dream since it hinges on the player pulling off "an extremely precise and illogical-sounding sequence of actions," the Redditor says, but it ends with speedrunners being able to execute a JUMP instruction right to the very end of the game.
Less than a year ago, a similar AJS skip involving a totally different set of seemingly illogical steps was found in GTA: San Andreas' Definitive Edition version. Both AJS skips had such a big effect on the community, speedruns were split into any% and any% no AJS categories.
Now, another AJS skip has been found, this time in the original PC port of San Andreas. The entire step-by-step walkthrough posted to Reddit is absolutely bonkers as it involves winning $10,000 via horse betting, duplicating the main script, intentionally drowning your bike in a lake eight times, breaking the game so hard that the world turns into a "black void," and much, much more.
San Andreas' latest AJS skip resulted in the any% run being trimmed down to just 53 minutes and 46 seconds by speedrunner creezyful (good spot, IGN), and I'm sure that time will be cut further as the weeks go on.
