20 Years Ago, ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ Perfectly Recreated Nineties Los Angeles

The camera finally settles behind CJ’s shoulders. We’re in an alley with a small bike leaning against a brick wall, maybe somewhere between Dre’s Compton and Snoop’s Long Beach. Samuel L. Jackson cackles as his police car drives off, leaving you in a rival hood. 

There’s the Los Angeles that movies and television created — Chinatown, 90210, Boyz n the Hood. But not until Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was there the Los Angeles that games created. Released on October 26, 2004, San Andreas still seems as large and in charge as it was 20 years ago, from the smoggy skies of Los Santos and winding countryside roads of Flint County, to the classic early Nineties rap and R&B on the radio. Even the ill-fated GTA Definitive Editions released a few years ago with their litany of glitches and immersion-breaking lack of distance fog, can’t disturb the nostalgia. 

Though it’s possible to ride up Mulholland (Hollywood Hills-coded) or Richman (Bel Air) in a sports car, as far as the main story is concerned, you’re firmly fixed in the world south of the 10 Freeway for the first few hours of the game — a world that is centered for the first time in gaming. San Andreas also introduces the series’ first Black protagonist, Carl “CJ” Johnson, with RPG elements that make every gamer’s playthrough look and feel different. Playing back in the day, I couldn’t be bothered to go to the gym or eat at Cluckin’ Bell, so my CJ was always rail thin with a ‘fro and a goatee, trackpants, and a Grove Street sweatshirt. What did your CJ look like? 

Reaching out to talk with those involved with San Andreas about the game’s legacy two decades later, it became clear that this wasn’t just the project of the two British founders, Sam and Dan Houser, and the rest of the Rockstar team, but also of hip-hop legends who lent their voice and lived expertise to recreate early Nineties Los Angeles during an age of the crack epidemic, police brutality, and the L.A. riots. 

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Ahead of San Andreas turning 20, Rolling Stone spoke with Rockstar brass as well as many voices in the game including Faizon Love, Young Maylay, Shawn Fonteno, and MC Eiht, to look back on how Grand Theft Auto redefined players’ perception of L.A. 

Laying down the blueprint

Obbe Vermeij tweets a lot about GTA these days to his tens of thousands of followers, finally laying to rest longtime mysteries like why planes randomly fall from the sky and crash near CJ during the game. A technical director at Rockstar Games and its studio Rockstar North from 1995 to 2009, Vermeij worked on GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas and GTA IV.

He tells Rolling Stone that the sprawling map for San Andreas was initially envisioned as three distinct maps with players only able to travel between these worlds using planes, trains and buses. 

But later, at a small meeting, Vermeij explains, Rockstar North ultimately settled on having one big map, with vast countryside and desert in between. Enter areas like spooky Back O’ Beyond and the quaint Tierra Robada. Rockstar then packed the world with everything from skydiving and harrier jets to trucking — all within a 6×6 kilometer map, a step up from the 4×4 kilometers for GTA III and Vice City.  “It seems crazy in retrospect,” Vermeij says. 

While its contemporaries like The Getaway (2002), a huge recreation of London, and True Crime Streets of L.A.(2003), focused on making the biggest open world game ever, Vermeij says Rockstar prioritized the fun factor, making sure that every corner of their world had a purpose. 

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Vermeij explains that after GTA III’s release in 2001, the team celebrated by going to Miami for a week, the inspiration of the next game’s locale. Then after Vice City, some time in 2002, the team, now a band of 50, traveled to L.A., San Francisco and Vegas for a similar mix of reverie and research..   

“Artists were running around with their digital cameras, which was kind of new at the time,” Vermeij says. “A lot of those pictures ended up being textures in the game.”

If you want an idea of how seriously Rockstar took San Andreas, Vermeij recalls that halfway through development, Rockstar New York went back and made sure that each gang had a different walk, true to real life. So all the animators had to retrace their steps to make sure CJ’s Grove Street gang, for instance, moved differently than their rivals in purple, the Ballas. 

Bringing aboard the culture

With a cast including Samuel L. Jackson as corrupt cop Officer Tenpenny, Chris Penn, Faizon Love, Yo-Yo, Ice-T, Charlie Murphy, David Cross, James Woods, and many more, San Andreas packs the kind of star power that had only been seen in movies up until that point. Many of these voices, though, were brought together by one common denominator — the legendary L.A. producer DJ Pooh.

Part of the Eighties L.A. collective Uncle Jamm’s Army that included Ice-T, Pooh went on to produce the timeless beat for Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day” and co-wrote the comedy Friday, reportedly given screenwriting software from the Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton. Later, Pooh was tapped by Rockstar where he shares co-writing credits for San Andreas and continues to work with the company today.

When and how exactly Pooh first crossed paths with Rockstar isn’t exactly clear. But everyone I spoke to was adamant about his pivotal role — and requisite cred — that made the game roar. 

Young Maylay, voice of Carl Johnson, says that sometime around 2002 or 2003, he went through a series of trials before Rockstar finally chose him as the main character. In one early call, Maylay just thought he was having another typical conversation with Pooh about potential new beats to use. But little did Maylay know that this conversation also had Rockstar brass listening in on speakerphone and seeing if the young L.A.rapper with no acting experience had the chops to headline their new game.  

At another point, Maylay went down to a warehouse in Los Angeles for a photoshoot as an early way to model out characters.

“It looked like they were giving away turkeys over there because there were so many people standing in line,” Maylay says, calling back one audition where he was asked to read a Menace II Society script. But Maylay grew up on that movie, and it wasn’t long before he was delivering lines with ease and adding his own flair to it.

Speaking of Menace II Society, Rockstar also had to get MC Eiht, the legendary Compton gangsta rapper whose song “Straight Up Menace,” weaves in and out of the movie. Eiht strainays it was an easy decision to voice turncoat character Ryder in the game. “Pooh hit me up, told me they had a character and wanted to know if I would do voiceover…. I’m just like ‘fuck it.’ So he flew me to New York and put me in a studio.”

Another common denominator is that these performers claim to have had no idea what project they were auditioning for in the beginning, much less that they were about to be a part of what would become one of biggest games of all time. 

“Hey cuz, you know how to play video games?” Faizon Love, begins, doing a patented imitation of Pooh. Love is the voice of Sweet, CJ’s stern but faithful older brother, de and previously worked with Pooh on Friday. The veteran actor and comedian says he received a call from Pooh in the early 2000s on a Wednesday. By Thursday, Love was on a flight to New York City to record his lines.

Love recalls a fun, relaxed environment where he worked about 12 hours total  — enjoying plenty of Thai food and sightseeing in between. “When I got there [to Rockstar], they had some thick-ass book,” Love says, remembering seeing the behemoth script on the first day. 

Maylay’s sessions, meanwhile, were pretty intensive. He remembers being asked if he could be available for a full month in New York City and called the San Andreas script “thicker than a bible.” Adding to it, Maylay had to say the same lines in different voices and registers, to account for the different versions of CJ —  from skinny all the way to overweight. “I had to do the regular lines, plus the lines as a big dude,” Maylay says.

Watts-born Shawn Fontero, voice of Franklin Clinton in GTA V (2013), is closest to Pooh, and rolled with the likes of Ice Cube and Compton-Watts rapper Kam in the early Nineties. He even rapped on a few Pooh and Kam tracks under the name Solo. 

It’s not exactly clear to Fontero how Pooh connected with Rockstar, either. But he remembers being at Pooh’s beach town house in the early 2000s, when Pooh first started talking about Grand Theft Auto. “I remember Pooh telling us he met these video game creator dudes,” Fontero begins. “I wasn’t taking it serious… but it was the Grand Theft Auto series.”

Fontero is also crystal clear about how pivotal Pooh was in making the game’s early Nineties west coast setting work so well. “He was their connection to the streets,” he adds. “Pooh was bringing them [Rockstar] all around the city, and letting them meet all the realest people they could meet.”

What many don’t know is that Fontero voiced gang member “Fam1” and other NPCs that CJ can recruit for certain missions in San Andreas. And about a decade later, Fontero went from being a side player on Grove Street to being recognized all around the world as one of the three main characters in Grand Theft Auto V, one of the highest selling games of all time. “I owe Rockstar all of this for me, man,” he says.

20 years later

West coast hip-hop heads could talk San Andreas references all day, starting with the game’s g-funk laden theme song during the opening credits, music which reappears after each mission pass. As it turns out, the theme was created a world away from inner-city L.A. by Scottish music composer Michael Hunter, who says he devoured hip-hop growing up with his friend who would record Yo! MTV Raps episodes on VHS.

Then there’s San Andreas’ signature biomes, a feature prevalent in most games with fictional settings, but were of the utmost importance in accurately recreating the diverse environments of Southern California. Vermeij says Art Director Aaron Garbut emphasized these different climate zones in development, leading to the smoggy red-orange skies of Los Santos, San Fierro’s bluish white, and the piping hot reds of Las Venturas. 

The game even touches on tensions between Black and brown people living in L.A. at the time, before later serving up CJ and Cesar Vialpando as perhaps the best bromance in gaming. 

Many of the people involved still fondly remember San Andreas’ whopping 101 story missions, including the notorious “Wrong Side of the Tracks.” Maylay doesn’t immediately recall the name, but soon utters the timeless line Big Smoke barks when players inevitably fail that mission again and again: “All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!” 

Others, like Faizon Love, didn’t even initially play San Andreas at release. Love remembers being spurred by a surprise call from Vince Vaughn, who said, “‘Hey I’m playing [with you] right now on San Andreas!’”

In a way, San Andreas builds on the stories first introduced to the mainstream through Nineties hip-hop and hood movies. But in those stories, even as we see people’s hopes and potential, it almost seems impossible for anyone to get out. But just the following decade, CJ and his pals are able to get out of the hood, then go around the world and back again — as CJ returns home to set things right on his own terms. 

“Pooh is a fucking genius because he is able to put his stamp down in different places as far as music, movies, video games,” Maylay says. 

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It doesn’t seem to be lost on any of San Andreas’ collaborators that they, too, are not where they first started, either. 

“For him [Maylay] to land that role as CJ in San Andreas, it made us all happy,” Fonteno says. “Everyone was happy when that game came out. I didn’t start playing video games until that. [But] we could all relate to that. Who couldn’t?”