Top gamers are speedrunning San Andreas instead of tackling cold fusion challenges.

A wild new speedrunning technique for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has emerged, breathing new life into the “Any%” category after a six-year hiatus.

Once a thriving hub for Any% speedrunners, the community dwindled when a new strategy for the Windows Store version surfaced six years ago. This method, known as the Arbitrary Jump in Skip (AJS), allowed players to leap to any point in the game, including the final mission, potentially slashing over three hours off their playtime. According to a Reddit user, this 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.”

Recently, a new exploit was revealed for the original PC version of the game, and it operates quite differently from both the AJS method for the Windows Store and the strategy found in the Definitive Edition about eight months ago.

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The newly uncovered technique for the original PC release of San Andreas is so bizarre that the effort to uncover it is as astonishing as the execution itself. As the Reddit user puts it, “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.”

The user details a 31-step process to pull off the “OG PC release” exploit. It all kicks off with betting on in-game horse races until the player rakes in $10,000, but caution is advised against winning too much, as it can complicate things later on.

Players will then use their winnings to buy the Jefferson Safehouse, grab the nearby NRG-500 superbike, and perform stunt jumps. Thanks to a glitch from an earlier step, these jumps will actually cost players money, which is why it’s crucial to keep winnings in check during the horse racing phase. The aim is to perform enough stunt jumps to dip cash reserves into the negatives—specifically, $-1,050—to break the gambling game in a later step.

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

From there, the process only gets crazier, ultimately leading players to the final mission.

“Do the final mission as normal,” they conclude in the last step. “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 current world record for the San Andreas Any% speedrun is held by a player who completed the game in 53 minutes and 46.94 seconds, noting that their time could “be improved by 2-3 minutes with current strats,” hinting that there may be even more layers to the already intricate San Andreas OG PC release AJS method.

It’s undeniably impressive, but is it worth the effort? As someone who enjoys watching speedruns rather than participating, I say absolutely!