“Respect +” – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

**Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas** (Rockstar, PlayStation 2, 2004)

In my journey through 2000, I talked about the unprecedented achievement of the game Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in selling one million copies in the UK. It took about 17 weeks to do so. Four years later, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reached the same milestone in 9 days. It sold 677,000 copies in its first weekend alone, more than doubling the previous record set by Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Comparable numbers in any media were few and far between, but the weekend sales were pretty close to those for Oasis’s 1997 album Be Here Now (695,000), the highly-anticipated behemoth released when they were the most popular band in the country by a distance. Though beyond the first week, there’s no comparison, as once the hype wore off became clear Be Here Now was a disaster. It’s a fair shortcut to say that in cultural impact terms, San Andreas is like if Be Here Now hadn’t been terrible, and had cemented the popularity of its creators and genre rather than finishing it off.

Musical comparisons are particularly apt, because music is more central to San Andreas than ever. I absolutely loved the radio stations of Grand Theft Auto III, but they were mostly a particularly well-designed and executed bit of background detail. It is just about impossible to imagine San Andreas without hip-hop. That music directly comes into the game’s narrative through a couple of fictional rappers, one played by Ice-T, but it’s the beating heart of it all the way through. Hip-hop iconography infuses the game’s UI as completely as Vice City’s neon aesthetic. Hip-hop producer DJ Pooh is one of San Andreas’s writers, and at times it feels like the rest of the game was designed as something to fit in around the music rather than the other way round.

This is both an inspired choice and a double-edged sword. San Andreas, like Vice City before it, is a period piece, set this time in an alternate world version of early ‘90s California. It’s working with an exciting time, but one whose narrative was settled and established, and already nostalgic, rather than trying to capture a current moment. This was a bit more of an achievable goal for a developer led by white British people. And the music they chose is a perfect fit for the themes of Grand Theft Auto. Freedom, humour, excess, struggle, an outsized vision of America painted in bold colours: all there and then some. Grand Theft Auto games were always America as viewed from across the Atlantic on-screen; this one is America as heard on stereos.

There is a real effort to tell a more serious story, with a narrative that starts with the main character’s mum being killed and actually grapples with it as more than a prompt for revenge. Carl Johnson and his homies feel closer to being believable people than previous equivalents. The unprecedented vastness of the game’s setting is juxtaposed very effectively with the way it comes back again and again to such a small neighbourhood that makes up their lives. It really earns its build-up. And playing as a gang member forced at points into the service of corrupt police officers is a wonderful reversal of other games’ already overused undercover cop approach.

A bunch of new life sim elements, the need to eat and train, help in their own way too. Plus customisation allowing you to show up a pink ride with a leopard print cowboy hat, and no one commenting on it, rules. The setting of San Andreas dispenses with mere realism to fine effect at times too: its nighttime scenes with a Majora’s Mask-sized mega moon, and the intense orange glow of its sunsets are beautiful. This being a Grand Theft Auto game, the actual game part involves a lot of killing and gang warfare. The missions are inventive within their constraints, and as someone who prefers to stay in the car as long as possible the drive-by shooting mechanic is an excellent addition. You get some new things like spraying graffiti and car dancing too, alongside a ridiculous range of more optional mini-games to fill out the life it offers you.

As another white British person I’m not in a particularly good position to comment on how the criminal emphasis goes together with racial stereotypes. Michel Marriott in the New York Times certainly objected to it before the game’s release, though the article’s ludicrous opening line “the screen crackles with criminality as a gang of urban predators itch for a kill“ seems to go beyond anything in San Andreas. As with many such cases, any problems have to be set in context of the lack of mainstream alternatives. Nearly a decade after Tomb Raider was the first UK #1 game I covered to make you play exclusively as a woman, this is the first such game to make you play exclusively as a Black person who isn’t a real-life athlete. And it’s another story of so many being told by a company led by white men. Those two things inevitably magnify any problems.

The game’s actual biggest controversy, of course, turned out to be incompletely removed scenes which dared to depict people having consensual sex. In a video game! The very thought of it! Sometimes real-life America is beyond any parody.

Parody is the stuff Grand Theft Auto was built on, but sits a good deal more oddly in San Andreas. The radio stations illustrate the shift, with a big emphasis on genuine hit songs and only a couple of stations left as sources of humour. Even then, stuff like a travelogue celebrating the chance to taste a fine German’s wurst feels less concentrated on parodying America than Grand Theft Auto III. And when the characters stop to eat at a Clucking Bell, it comes as an infringement on the detailed and realistic lives they’ve been given. When the radio is playing songs with tales of Compton and Los Angeles, it doesn’t even make sense that the characters listening to them are doing so in Ganton in Los Santos.

The bigger problem that illustrates is that some of the songs in San Andreas, and the cultural milieu it taps into, already fulfil all of its storytelling goals so well that it can feel a little pointless next to them. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was the biggest thing in games and for all the ambition and success of its storytelling, it’s built on top of a parodic, nihilist model fundamentally unsuited for it, and the joins show. In that, it was representative of a whole swathe of games already out and games to come.