GTA dev is back to spoil another San Andreas secret

GTA as a franchise is naturally laden with secrets, even beyond the ones that players were always supposed to find. The Easter eggs of the series have always been iconic, with moon mysteries and discovering the Statue of Liberty’s giant beating heart becoming core elements of the game’s life, but there are still secrets yet to be uncovered that lay much deeper in the code of the games.

And now, a developer has revealed a behind-the-scenes detail that caused a strange phenomenon across San Andreas.

GTA dev reveals why planes kept crashing in San Andreas

San Andreas veterans will know that there was one phenomenon that plagued the game that always went without any reasoning or answers from Rockstar Games - sometimes, small planes would simply plummet out of the sky or crash in any other way, exploding on contact.

This has always been a curiosity in the world of GTA occurrences, and now ex-developer Obbe Vermeij has revealed exactly why the crashes would occur. “Before creating the plane, my code looks for obstacles in its path,” he says. “It scans a number of lines in the forward direction of the plane. These scans are slow so I used the absolute minimum. (Just the body and wingtips I believe) This is why thin obstacles are sometimes not detected.”

He continues - “These issues would occasionally allow planes to be created on a doomed flightpath. I was aware of the crashes and briefly considered removing the fly-by’s altogether.”

Obbe Vermeij is a reliable Rockstar leaker

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Aside from actually working on the games himself, Vermeij has made a name for himself online by providing fans of the output of Rockstar Games with plenty of reliable claims when it comes to their projects. He even revealed to fans details of the canned Rockstar spy game aiming to capitalise on the popularity of James Bond games, titled Agent. The dev revealed in a now-deleted blog post that the game began as “spy stuff” in San Andreas that developed to feature mechanics surrounding gliders and cars that transform into submarines.

It sounded like a real beast of a game that could have seriously contested James Bond titles, but it seems lost to time now. Still, at least there’s a good chance that Vermeij has more beans to spill.