GTA: San Andreas speedrun trick cuts world record from 4 hours to 30 minutes

The discovery of a new GTA: San Andreas speedrun trick that skips you forward to the game's final mission has slashed the world record from nearly four hours to just 26 minutes.

Powdinet detailed the full technique in this Reddit post: it has more than 40 steps, the first being to start the game and find a police bike. In the final step, starting an in-vehicle vigilante mission during a specific part of the mission Ryder makes the game jump forward, with the landing point linked to the amount of time since the run started. "With the ability to execute any line of script code, we can warp to any mission we want," Powdinet explains.

They've been searching for this type of glitch for three years on and off in San Andreas and found a version of the warp "months ago", but couldn't get it to stick. Now, they've finally managed to make it work, and they expect other speedrunners to shave even more time off the record by using the glitch.

Powdinet completed the game in 25m 52s—the previous record, set by Ielreset, was 3h 52m 07s, according to speedrun.com.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.