Ex-Rockstar Dev Sheds Light on GTA San Andreas’ Gravity-Defying Helicopter Bug

If you thought you had seen all the hilarious bugs that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had to offer, think again. A recently surfaced video clip shows one of the most absurd glitches players have encountered yet in the classic open-world game – and luckily for us, a former developer swooped in on social media to explain why it happened, too.

The video, shared on Twitter (or X, if you prefer), depicts a player attempting to park a helicopter on a towed truck and driving it into a garage. So far, so good. However, when the garage door reopens, the laws of physics have gone completely out the window – the helicopter is now resting upside down while the truck remains perfectly upright.

@ObbeVermeij Sir,
I saw this interesting bug of GTA SA in Instagram.
Do you know why it is happening?https://t.co/Kh8wK7B3OS

— DindaD (@DindaDattatreya) May 2, 2024

It gets even better. When the player tows the flipped helicopter back out and climbs aboard, the chopper takes off and proceeds to fly along… upside down. Thankfully, former Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij, who worked on San Andreas and has been on a recent “behind the scenes” streak online, had a simple explanation for the gravity-defying bug.

According to him, when a garage door closed, the game would remove the vehicles inside to reduce RAM usage on aging PlayStation 2 hardware – this method isn’t exclusive to San Andreas, but is fairly common; and also fairly often the source of some glitches.

However, upon reopening the garage, the vehicles were recreated based on their stored positions and attributes. It seems that the code responsible for this process encountered a glitch when dealing with helicopters, leading to their inverted recreation.

He went on to admit that garages were never tested with aircraft or watercraft during development, as the system was designed with only standard road vehicles in mind. “I never tested the garages with non cars and neither did QA it seems,” he said. Never underestimate players is the moral of this story.

This hugely entertaining glitch is far from the only strange quirk San Andreas players have uncovered over the years. Vermeij has been a good sport throughout, regularly providing gamers with insights into the original weird workarounds and glitches that defined classic GTA titles.

Just last month, Vermeij shed light on San Andreas‘ infamous plane crashes that have puzzled GTA fans for years, prior to which he deep-dived into an explanation of why the moon changes size when you shoot at it.

For many gamers, these delightfully broken moments are just another part of what makes the fictional world of games so entertaining, even years later. While bugs and glitches can sometimes frustrate players, the enduring appeal of San Andreas lies in its ability to embrace these glitches and turn them into sources of amusement. Just like in real life, not all bugs are a nuisance.