Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
The legendary Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas just celebrated its 20th birthday, having first dropped on PlayStation 2 in North America on October 26, 2004. To mark this milestone, original developer Obbe Vermeij, who started blogging last year about his work on classic Rockstar titles like GTA and unreleased projects including Agent, shared some behind-the-scenes intel. (Fun fact: that blogging stint got shut down pretty quick because of those Agent revelations, but hopefully his current San Andreas map stories won’t meet the same fate!)
The Truth About GTA San Andreas’s Size
Here’s a mind-bender: the map might not be as massive as you remember. By today’s standards (and even how it felt back then), it’s actually just 6×6 kilometers – though the clever design often made it feel way bigger. Vermeij by himself admitted this in the comments, noting how different the scale feels when the fog lifts.
The Original Three-Map Design
The dev team initially had a totally different blueprint in mind. Worried about maxing out the PS2’s memory, they planned to split the three cities into separate maps – Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas. Players would’ve hopped between them using trains and planes, just like in the old-school 2D GTAs. This would’ve been a memory-saving hack since they wouldn’t need to keep unused city models loaded. Vermeij notes this approach could’ve also let them give each city its own distinct vibe with unique weather, different police forces, emergency services, and other cool variations. Plus, it might’ve kept players exploring one area longer (though let’s be real – who didn’t immediately go exploring anyway?) and helped with disk data organization.
The Final Decision
The art team had actually started working on the three separate maps when a crucial meeting at Rockstar North changed everything. During this pivotal powwow – attended by Leslie Benzies, Aaron Garbut, Adam Fowler, Alexander Sandy Roger, and Vermeij himself – they decided to go all-in on one massive map instead. And as any GTA fan knows, they still managed to make each city feel unique in the final version.
