Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Trick Takes 3 Hours Off Speedrunning Record

Grand Theft Auto players are still finding tricks and secrets in the series years after the games have released. This is true for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as well, a game that's now had one of its speedrunning records shredded by an intricate series of actions that shaved around three hours off the record completion time. A speedrunner shared a video and a breakdown of the process this week to show how players can jump right to the end mission of the game by following some instructions.

The speedrunner known as Powdinet shared a post on Reddit (thanks, Kotaku) breaking down the steps for beating San Andreas in record time. Powdinet made use of a script glitch like one found in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City that similarly cut the speedrunning record down drastically. The user's video above will walk you through the entire process from start to finish with the result seeing the game completed in just under 26 minutes.

"The short story is that starting Vigilante during a certain part of the mission Ryder makes the game jump to an arbitrary line of script (.scm) code, depending on a variable that is linked to the time since the game started," the crafty speedrunner said. "With the ability to execute any line of script code, we can warp to any mission we want. This glitch only works on the Windows Store version."

Like any speedrun, this one requires some precision to pull off even if you know how to do it. There are many steps listed in the Reddit post that call for some quick actions like reacting to situations in fractions of seconds to make sure everything works the way it's supposed to. The big time jump happens just after 16 minutes into the video.

Though a new record has been set, Powdinet said they're sure people will be able to build on this method to fine-tune the process. They said they'd been searching for this kind of a glitch off and on for around three years and that they expect improvements to be made at some point. If you want to give the record a shot to see if you can find a quicker time, the tools are now there thanks to Powdinet.