Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas

Carl Johnson gets fat if you feed him too much fried chicken. That single detail says more about what Rockstar North was attempting in 2004 than any amount of talk about map size. Muscle, body fat and stamina were tracked separately, each fed by what CJ ate and how hard you pushed him at the gym, and they were only the front rank of a stat sheet that also logged his driving, his lung capacity, his skill with each class of firearm, and how much respect the neighbourhood afforded him. An open-world crime game had quietly grown a role-playing spine.

The state itself remains the more famous achievement: Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas linked by desert, farmland, forest and a mountain, all held on one disc on hardware with 32MB of RAM. Rockstar paid for that ambition in draw distance and pop-in, and the haze rolling in a hundred metres out is the compromise made visible. It works anyway, partly because the fog reads as smog and heat, partly because the geography is genuinely varied enough that crossing it by motorbike at dusk still feels like travel rather than traversal.

The story is where the game is most disciplined. It opens narrow — Grove Street, a murdered mother, a crew that has drifted to crack and infighting — and the early missions are small, local, and about reclaiming turf spray can by spray can. Then it widens, and CJ is dragged through corrupt cops, a cousin's failing garage, casino skimming and government black sites, tonally indebted to early-nineties West Coast cinema without ever collapsing into pastiche. The voice work, Samuel L. Jackson's crooked officer Tenpenny included, is doing real work.

Not everything survived contact with the ambition. The flight school and the harder driving tests are famously punishing, mission checkpointing is thin by any modern standard, and a handful of set pieces still lean on the era's habit of restarting you a long way back. The camera fights you indoors. Those are the seams of a game that shipped enormous rather than polished.

What holds up is how much of it is optional and how little of that feels like padding. You can run a truck haulage business, learn to swim properly, take a girlfriend to dinner and lose her by turning up in the wrong car. San Andreas trusted players to wander off, and nearly twenty years of open-world design has been catching up to that trust ever since.