A bizarre GTA San Andreas glitch is making speedruns relevant again

Here we go again...

A new (and insanely complicated) speedrunning strategy for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been discovered, reviving the popularity of "Any%" speedruns for the first time in six years.

San Andreas once had a pretty prolific Any% speedrunning community, but it died down when, six years ago, a new Any% strategy was uncovered for the Windows Store version of the game. This new strategy could save speedrunners over three hours of playtime if executed correctly. Known as the Arbitrary Jump in Skip (AJS) method, this exploit allowed players to skip to any point in the game, including the final mission. Per Reddit user Vitosi4ek, the exploit "ultimately kind of destroyed true Any% [runs] and barely anyone has run it after the initial surge, with the newly-renamed Any% No AJS category remaining most popular and fun to both run and watch."

Vitosi4ek recently shared on Reddit that a new exploit has been discovered in the original PC release of the game, but it works very differently from both the AJS method for the Windows Store version of the game and the method for Definitive Edition of the game, which was discovered about eight months ago.

👏 Here 👏 we 👏 go 👏 again 👏

The newly discovered method for pulling this off on the original PC release of San Andreas is so genuinely unhinged, the work necessary to discover it as mind-boggling as the execution. In the words of Vitosi4ek, "The sequence of actions needed to achieve it is, frankly, the most thorough destruction of a videogame I've ever seen. It's a culmination of almost every glitch discovered by the SA community up to this point."

Vitosi4ek is not kidding. Their post goes on to list the 31-step process to execute the "OG PC release" exploit method. Step one involves placing bets on in-game horse races until the player has won $10,000, but Vitosi4ek warns against earning too much money, as that can cause problems later, in step seven.

Eventually, players should use their winnings to purchase the Jefferson Safehouse, then retrieve the nearby NRG-500 superbike and do some stunt-jumps. Due to a glitch executed in a previous step, doing stunt-jumps will actually lose the players money, which is why Vitosi4ek warns against earning too much during the horse race gambling step. The goal is to do stunt-jumps until one's cash reserves hit the negatives — $-1,050 to be exact — which will break the gambling game in step ten.

"We need to make 3 extremely specific bets at the specific spots on the table to set the variables in memory just right," Vitosi4ek writes. "Here, a bunch of real-time math needs to be done to determine how to get to those amounts."

Things only get more unhinged from there, eventually landing players at the final mission of the game.

"Do the final mission as normal," Vitosi4ek explains in the 31st and final step in the sequence. "And now you can beat GTA San Andreas PC version in roughly an hour instead of 3, at the expense of what remains of your sanity."

The San Andreas Any% speedrun world record now belongs to creezyful, who finished the game in 53 minutes and 46.94 seconds on Wednesday, but stated that their time could "be improved by 2-3 minutes with current strats," suggesting there may be even more steps to the already convoluted San Andreas OG PC release AJS method.

Well, it's certainly impressive, but is it worth it? As someone who enjoys watching speedruns rather than participating in them, I say yes.