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.
The new record holder is Powdinet, and you can see their run in the video above. The process, which only works in the Windows Store version of the game, lets the player warp to a later mission after performing a series of complex steps, and is based on a similar technique used in GTA: Vice City speedruns. The actual moment of the skip happens around the 16 minute mark in the video.
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.
