Kreyg, the streamer who gave the internet the Kreygasm emote, has modded Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas so his viewers can call Carl Johnson directly. Just like that, CJ's phone won't stop ringing. Send a donation or a message and it shows up as an actual in-game phone call, with the phone ringing, CJ answering it with the same clunky 2004 animation he always has, and your text plays back through text-to-speech as the voice on the line.
The clip went up on September 2 and promptly cleared a million views, and it is easy to see why. There is something perfect about a 20-year-old Carl Johnson patiently taking calls from strangers on the internet.
According to Kreyg, he built it with the plugin-sdk library on the game's side and a custom C# program that feeds Twitch chat and text-to-speech into the game.
He did not stop at phone calls, either. The next day he pushed it further, letting viewers spawn into the game as one of CJ's homies or as an enemy, and letting chat trigger San Andreas' classic cheat codes on command. More features are on the way, all the while promising more features on the way.
What Twitch chat can do to CJ
Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
Phone calls | Viewer text-to-speech messages ring CJ's phone and play as the caller's dialogue |
Spawn as a homie | A viewer drops in as one of CJ's allies |
Spawn as an enemy | A viewer joins hostile, turning the stream into a brawl |
Trigger cheats | Chat fires off classic San Andreas cheat codes mid-stream |
The viewer-triggered features Kreyg has added to his stream so far.
Kreyg is refreshingly clear about what he wants to achieve with all this. Where the official roleplay scene chases serious, persistent stories, he would rather chase pure chaos, the kind of stream where chat conspires to make CJ beat the game, no different from famous runs of Twitch chat "guiding" a bot into finishing games like Pokemon, among others.
While amusing, it also serves as a reminder of how alive classic Grand Theft Auto modding remains. In the last week alone, one modder gave the GameCube the full Grand Theft Auto: Vice City game and not too long ago, another stitched the whole 3D trilogy together through portals.
Kreyg turning the entirety of Los Santos into a live Twitch playground fits right in with what's going on right now in the Grand Theft Auto scene even though most are focused on Grand Theft Auto VI.
Twenty years and a record-breaking Netflix reveal later, people are still finding fresh ways to crack these games open.