Just when you thought a 22-year-old game couldn't surprise anyone anymore, the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas speedrunning community has discovered something so absurdly complex that it sounds like a fever dream someone had after going down the Grand Theft Auto VI rabbit hole so hard that they end up believing that the moon theory will eventually come true.
Apparently, speedrunners have found a way to beat the classic PS2 title in under an hour, and the process involves winning exactly $10,000 at a horse racing track, deliberately driving your bank account into negative $1,050 through stunt jumps, placing three mathematically calculated casino bets at specific table positions, creating a character clone, avoiding vending machines like they're radioactive, changing clothes at precise moments, completing a dance minigame, and somehow running two missions simultaneously.
Just like with any speedrunning attempt, precision is key. You have to execute each step perfectly. Otherwise, the entire thing just falls apart.
A runner named creezyful set the world record at 53 minutes and 46 seconds just days after the discovery went public, though they noted they could still improve the time by several minutes with practice.
For context, the previous any% record on the original PC version without this skip was hovering around three hours. This new method cuts that time by more than two-thirds.
The journey begins at the horse racing track, where players need to win exactly $10,000. Not $9,999. Not $10,001. Exactly ten thousand dollars. Winning too much money will break the glitch sequence later on, so precision matters. From there, players purchase a specific safehouse in Jefferson and grab a nearby superbike to perform stunt jumps. Due to an earlier glitch in the sequence, these stunt jumps cause players to lose money instead of gaining it, which is the opposite of how the game is supposed to work. The goal is to drive your bank account into the negatives, specifically hitting negative $1,050, which breaks the gambling system in a very particular way that's crucial for what comes next.
Players then head back to the casino and place three incredibly specific bets at exact spots on the roulette table. This requires real-time mathematical calculations to determine the precise amounts needed to manipulate the game's memory in just the right way. Get the math wrong, and you're starting over.
But that's not even the strangest part. The full 31-step process involves creating a clone of your character through a mission glitch, carefully avoiding every vending machine you encounter because interacting with one will corrupt the sequence, changing CJ's clothes at specific moments to trigger memory offsets, completing the dancing minigame at a nightclub with frame-perfect inputs, and executing two missions at the same time through a script overlap exploit. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder how anyone figured this out in the first place.
