I love Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for many reasons. It was the first open-world sandbox-style game I ever played, and the first in the GTA series. It provides an engrossing world with beautiful scenery and dynamic environments. And of course it’s a really fun game to play. (For some reason I really liked the part where you fight over gang territory with color codes on the map.)

But my love for this game goes much deeper. In an attempt to express my passion clearly, I shall use handy bullet points for easy exposition. I’ll try to keep this brief, but I’ve got lots and lots of stuff to say. Hopefully this goes without saying, but be aware that there are lots of spoilers ahead. (Note too that the video clips contain bad words.)

Let’s Get the Negatives Out of the Way

GTA:SA is not perfect. In the interest of fairness, I must criticize three important parts of the game.

• Big Smoke is a really racist character. In the “Drive Thru” mission, he places a huge order for fried chicken, and proceeds to joke — while his friends carry out drive-by shootings — about how he almost spilled his food. It’s funny, but it’s pretty minstrel-ish.

• Gang warfare and drug-pushing are presented as exciting and inevitable parts of ghetto life. As Michelle Alexander has made clear, the so-called “drug war” in the United States is a wrongheaded policy that sends African-Americans to prison at grotesquely inflated rates, despite the fact that drug use is about the same in both white and black communities. Millions of African-Americans living in urban slums work respectable jobs, stay away from violence, and live with dignity.

Yet in San Andreas, the only choice a black man has is to shoot other black men, smoke marijuana, and sell crack. I know it’s just a game, and there are plenty of other games where these activities are engaged in by Italians (Mafia II and Scarface), Eastern Europeans (GTA4) and Japanese (Yakuza). The difference is that those games also feature characters of various ethnic backgrounds in other roles as well. The only black men in GTA:SA are gang-bangers and corrupt police officers. (Oh, and there’s a rapper and a pimp too.) This is one of the reasons Spike Lee satirizes GTA:SA during this scene of his movie Inside Man.

Interesting side note: As I began working on this piece, I discovered a short film called “The Introduction“, which was produced by Rockstar as a prequel video for GTA:SA. There’s a really intriguing exchange in which Big Smoke and CJ’s brother Sweet try to school their friend Jeffrey, who wants to change his name to “OG Loc” (OG = Original Gangster). They explain to Jeffrey that, although they “messed [their] lives up” and are “fucked up in the game”, he should go to college and “make something of yourself”.

Rockstar definitely should have included this dialogue in GTA:SA itself, as it provides an important macrocosmic view of the drug game. As it is, Jeffrey is purely an object of derision and ridicule.

• The game is too damn hard. You know how Jimmy McMillan became famous by declaring that The Rent is Too Damn High? Well, I’m here to say that in GTA:SA, the missions are too damn hard. After just half an hour, you get thrown into the middle of a gun battle with a pistol and twenty bullets. Anyone who claims to have beaten the game without using a cheat code is a filthy liar!

It’s also really hard to get money in GTA:SA. You can exploit the horse racing minigame with saves and reloads, but you shouldn’t have to! Houses start at $10,000 and missions usually get you a couple of hundred dollars. The only other way to get paid is to rob people, but — especially at the start of the game — this takes forever. Especially insofar as you can only save in a house you own, they should have made money much easier to acquire. (Or enable other places to save.)

Why I Love This Game

Okay, enough with the complaints and criticisms. Let me tell you why I love this game.

• The Music. GTA:SA is set on the west coast of the US in 1992, when so-called “gangsta rap” was experiencing its explosion into popularity. Ice-T and NWA had paved the way, but Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg really blew up the G-funk sound starting with Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic. So it makes sense that Dre is the only artist with three tracks in the game, all of them featuring Snoop. Their hit song “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” quickly became the anthem for the west coast, and remains a landmark track for the entire gangsta era of hip-hop.

It’s not hard to see why: The high-pitched squeal combines with funky samples and deep bass (and superb lyrical skill) to form a silky-superb track. No wonder so many others imitated his style. Say what you want about the sexism and nihilism in his music (and his violent assault against Dee Barnes), Dr. Dre knows how to make a damn beat. The same sound shows up, too, in the theme song, produced by British composer Michael Hunter:

The rest of the Radio Los Santos playlist is solid too, featuring excellent rap tracks from NWA alums Ice Cube and The DOC (easily the most under-appreciated of them all), as well as Cypress Hill’s classic “How I Could Just Kill A Man” and one of 2-Pac’s only explicitly political tracks. (“I Don’t Give a F***”, which — yeah, okay — doesn’t sound so political from the title. But he discusses, among other things, the first US war against Iraq: “And now they trying to send me off to Kuwait? / Gimme a break”)

Not that classic east-coast hip-hop isn’t represented. Careful not to play favorites, Rockstar included the “Playback FM” station, filled with classic rap tracks from New York. Brand Nubian, Gang Starr, Big Daddy Kane, and — of course — Public Enemy come through loud and clear. PE is a given, since the “DJ” for Playback FM is voiced by Chuck D, frontman for that group. (When he plays his own music, he refers to it as “a song that’s close to my heart”.)

There’s other good music in the game, too — Helmet’s “Unsung” and RATM’s “Killing in the Name” to name just two — but I’ll be here all day if I don’t move on.

• Samuel L. Jackson. Do I really need to write anything here? He’s Sam Jack! There’s no better choice for the ultimate video game villain, Officer Tenpenny. He’s caustic, he’s funny, he’s a total scumbag when he needs to be. (Plus, he can put your kids to sleep in seconds!)

There are other good voice actors in the game too — Sweet is played by Faizon Love, who also starred as Big Worm in Friday; Chris Penn, who you might remember from Reservoir Dogs, plays Officer Pulaski; rapper Madd Dogg is voiced by the legendary Ice-T (I just learned that the rappers Kid Frost, MC Eiht, and Yo-Yo are also in the game, and Charlie Murphy too, and I just learned that comedian David Cross plays the electronics nerd Zero); and James Woods plays government agent Mike Toreno.

• Stand up for your community, etc. To be fair to the social politics of GTA:SA, there are some community-minded themes here and there. CJ does, after all, want to bring his family back together after his mother is murdered. As sad as it is to see it predicated on the killing of other poor black men, there is a certain positive fraternal love inherent to the Grove Street set. And at the end of the game, you’re striking a blow for peace in your neighborhood by taking on the corrupt cop Tenpenny.

There’s other valuable social commentary in the game, too. One radio spot urges: “Poor people — watch TV! Don’t vote!” and GTA mainstays like AmmuNation satirize the US love affair with firearms. There’s plenty of homophobia and sexism in the game as well, but I have to give credit where it’s due.

• California knows how to party. Moving beyond the single-metropolis environs of previous GTA games, San Andreas roams over a huge area, including three main cities and acres of rural territory as well. I won’t go into all the real-world places recreated in the game, because you can read all about them on Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that Rockstar did an amazing job packing the game with diverse areas to explore.

And the people are no less intriguing than the locations. CJ meets aging hippies, Chinese kingpins, government operatives, entertainment executives, and tech geeks. (Not to mention the usual assortment of underworld shooters, addicts, prostitutes, hustlers, and pushers.) While many of the characters are pretty one-dimensional, the writing is at least decent, and they focus more on humor than the depth of story we get from, say, BioWare.

My favorite line in the game comes from CJ, when someone hits him in traffic: “How you allowed to drive if you blind!?” (And if you don’t get the reference in the title of this bullet point, you need to listen to more Tupac.)

• If it ain’t ruff, it ain’t me. San Andreas is the first game I ever played with meaningful character customization. There were games where you could choose a basic color, and some RPGs had different armor choices. But GTA:SA took it to another level, with multiple stores offering a good variety of options for how you wanted to look. African medallions, sharkskin suits, cowboy hats and boots — you name it. Tattoos and hairstyles upped the ante.

One of the things that disappointed me about GTA4 was that every clothing shop felt the same. Granted, I only made it about halfway through that game, but it felt like your options were a dumpy brown jogging suit, or a dumpy grey jogging suit.

(And if you don’t get the reference in the title of this bullet point, you need to listen to more NWA.)

There’s more to say about how much I love San Andreas, like the Romeo and Juliet storyline involving CJ’s sister Kendl and her boyfriend from the rival Aztecas gang. (When I first played, I totally expected a war between Grove Street and Cesar’s crew. But it never happens. Love conquers all, I guess.) But I think that’s enough for one day.

Next time I’ll discuss how Volition’s Saints Row improved on many of GTA:SA’s weak points, missed the boat on some of its better bits, and included the best side mission in the history of sanbox video games.

I’ll end here, however, with a true story from my classroom. Every semester I make my students write about their goals for the future. I tell them to include long-term, short-term, and medium-term goals. I tell them to include goals related to school, home, artistic endeavors, sports, whatever. Then we discuss.

When I first did this assignment myself, I was in the middle of my first San Andreas playthrough. So I began by writing: “One of my goals is to represent Grove Street all over Los Santos! Watch out suckas, CJ’s comin’ thru!!” (When I read this aloud in class, I put lots of bass in my voice and wave my hands around to make fake gang signs.) Sometimes when I wear the green tie that I got on our honeymoon in Venice, I’ll joke that I’m representing Grove Street. The cool kids know that I’m referencing GTA:SA, but most people (students and teachers) just look at me weird.

So when the city of Sun Prairie built a new high school last year, guess which street they put it on?

Awwww, yeah. Grove Street represent, f’real.

Share this post