A 2004 GTA San Andreas Bug Resurfaces After 20 Years, Thanks to Windows 11

Some bugs in games can lie dormant for decades, hiding in plain sight until the perfect conditions arise to expose them (a bit like real life conditions. Get your checkups, people!). That's exactly what happened with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, when players on Windows 11's 24H2 update suddenly discovered they couldn't find the Skimmer seaplane anywhere in the game.

When several users started reporting that the Skimmer seaplane had completely vanished after upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, it seemed like an unlikely coincidence, or maybe even a coordinated prank. How could the latest Windows update in 2025 break a specific plane in a game released in 2004?

The issue was confirmed by multiple players: the Skimmer wouldn't appear at its usual spawn points, and attempts to spawn it using trainers or cheat menus would either freeze the game or send the player character flying absurdly high into the sky, or more precisely, approximately 1.087 quadrillion light-years up!

Leave it to modders to save the day - Silent, the developer of SilentPatch (a popular mod that fixes numerous issues in Rockstar's titles), began investigating. After setting up a Windows 11 24H2 virtual machine and confirming the bug, they dove into the code. The investigation revealed that when a player entered the Skimmer, the game would get stuck trying to normalize the plane's rotor blade angle. The blade speed value was an astronomical 3.73340132e+29—far too large for the game's calculations to handle properly.

What caused this massive value? The answer lay in how the game handles vehicle data. The root cause was found in the game's vehicle configuration files - every vehicle in San Andreas is defined in a file called "vehicles.ide," which contains parameters like wheel scale values. The Skimmer's entry was missing four parameters, including front and rear wheel scale values.

This wasn't a new problem, as the Skimmer had been missing these parameters since the game's release. In GTA: Vice City (the previous GTA game), the Skimmer was classified as a boat, which didn't need these parameters. When Rockstar Games reclassified it as a plane in San Andreas, they forgot to add the required parameters.

However, if the bug existed for 20 years, why did it only cause problems now? When the game reads vehicle data, it uses a function that doesn't properly initialize variables or check if all parameters are present in the data file. For unspecified parameters, the function would use whatever values happened to be in that memory location.

For two decades, by sheer coincidence, those memory locations contained reasonable values. The game used these "accidental" values, and everything worked fine. That all changed in Windows 11 24H2, and to save you from all the technicalities that SilentPatch explained, it resulted in the bizarre behavior players were experiencing.

What's remarkable, though, is that this bug hadn't surfaced earlier. Looking at the memory patterns, Silent discovered that even in Windows 10, the game was just 4 bytes away from hitting this exact bug. The game had been riding on incredible luck for nearly 20 years - sort of.

Interestingly, this bug was actually fixed in some versions of the game. The original Xbox release and versions based on its code (like the Steam and Rockstar Games Launcher versions) corrected this, but the classic PC version continued to carry this bug. SilentPatch now includes a fix that adds default values for these missing parameters. Players who don't want to wait for the patch can fix it themselves by editing the "vehicles.ide" file to add the missing parameters to the Skimmer's entry.

Thanks to the modding community's profound understanding of these classic games, players can continue enjoying GTA: San Andreas for years to come, even as operating systems continue to evolve.