A Windows update is supposed to make your system a little safer, a little slicker—definitely not nudge your favorite 2000s criminal protagonist into an accidental odyssey across the universe. But that’s exactly what happened when Windows 11’s 24H2 update brought a two-decade-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas bubbling to the surface. Thanks to a serendipitous clash of vintage code and the fresh chaos of a modern OS, modder extraordinaire Silent found himself launching CJ not just into the sky, but roughly 1.087 quadrillion light years up—a distance even the Starship Enterprise might balk at.
It all starts innocently enough: a humble complaint about the Skimmer seaplane going AWOL in GTA: San Andreas after a Windows update. It won’t spawn, not via trainers, not at its regular haunts. Naturally, Windows 24H2 becomes suspect number one in this whodunit. Users even spin up virtual machines for controlled tests—because if there’s one thing GTA fans crave even more than mayhem, it’s reproducible mayhem. Skimmer alive in 23H2, MIA in 24H2. Case closed, right?
Silent, coder, bug-buster, and apparently part-time digital detective, decides to get his hands dirty. He boots up his own VM, spawns the plane, plops CJ inside…and promptly discovers space travel. “Yeet” doesn’t even begin to cover it. CJ gets punted a comically inconceivable distance—numbers so absurd, Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Drive is probably somewhere taking notes.
Of course, San Andreas’ graphics engine wasn’t built for this. Bereft of measurable reality, the game camera gives up. The plane’s ghostly outline lingers, but even the animations throw in the towel, defeated by floating point arithmetic gone rogue.
After much spelunking through code, Silent finds the rotten thread in this twisted fabric: a bad Z value (that’s vertical position in dev-speak). The Skimmer, due to an ancient data file gaffe, is missing vital parameters that define its wheels—because in its Vice City days, it was defined as a boat. When someone “upgraded” it to a plane for San Andreas, they forgot to add the new requirements, and nobody checked their work. The result? The game starts assigning random, uninitialized values when it tries to figure out where the Skimmer should be. Sometimes it gets lucky. Other times, well…CJ goes cosmic bowling.
Here’s the kicker: this bug has always been present. It could’ve surfaced at any time over the past 20 years, under the right cocktail of memory shuffles—an absolute butterfly effect in binary. Windows 11 just happened to stir the stack in such a way that the Skimmer’s absent parameters lined up exactly the wrong way, triggering the numerical nuke.
Rockstar’s own later releases, like the Xbox version and the Definitive Edition, apparently did slap a similar patch on. Silent, with characteristic thoroughness (and a healthy sense of pride), notes his fix is actually a bit more accurate—because when it comes to resurrecting old, weird bugs, there’s no room for half measures.
Ironically, despite the modern OS updates being fingered as the culprit, this bug could’ve surfaced on Windows 10, 7, XP, maybe even on a potato running Windows 98. The universe simply hadn’t rolled those dice until now. Sometimes, it’s not the codebase that changes, but the luck of the (memory) draw.
If you’re a coder, take heed: test your assumptions. Validate your data. And for goodness’ sake, never assume a plane is a boat. If you’re a gamer, be grateful for the SilentPatches of the world, keeping our virtual worlds slightly less likely to collapse into absurdity—unless, of course, we’re talking about GTA, where absurdity is half the fun.
Source: PC Gamer A Windows 11 update revealed a 2-decade old bug in GTA: San Andreas that yeets CJ at '1.087 quadrillion light years' into the stratosphere
The Bug Awakens: From Skimmer to SpaceX
It all starts innocently enough: a humble complaint about the Skimmer seaplane going AWOL in GTA: San Andreas after a Windows update. It won’t spawn, not via trainers, not at its regular haunts. Naturally, Windows 24H2 becomes suspect number one in this whodunit. Users even spin up virtual machines for controlled tests—because if there’s one thing GTA fans crave even more than mayhem, it’s reproducible mayhem. Skimmer alive in 23H2, MIA in 24H2. Case closed, right?Silent, coder, bug-buster, and apparently part-time digital detective, decides to get his hands dirty. He boots up his own VM, spawns the plane, plops CJ inside…and promptly discovers space travel. “Yeet” doesn’t even begin to cover it. CJ gets punted a comically inconceivable distance—numbers so absurd, Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Drive is probably somewhere taking notes.
Of course, San Andreas’ graphics engine wasn’t built for this. Bereft of measurable reality, the game camera gives up. The plane’s ghostly outline lingers, but even the animations throw in the towel, defeated by floating point arithmetic gone rogue.
The Devil in the Data (and a Touch of Old-Fashioned Luck)
After much spelunking through code, Silent finds the rotten thread in this twisted fabric: a bad Z value (that’s vertical position in dev-speak). The Skimmer, due to an ancient data file gaffe, is missing vital parameters that define its wheels—because in its Vice City days, it was defined as a boat. When someone “upgraded” it to a plane for San Andreas, they forgot to add the new requirements, and nobody checked their work. The result? The game starts assigning random, uninitialized values when it tries to figure out where the Skimmer should be. Sometimes it gets lucky. Other times, well…CJ goes cosmic bowling.
Here’s the kicker: this bug has always been present. It could’ve surfaced at any time over the past 20 years, under the right cocktail of memory shuffles—an absolute butterfly effect in binary. Windows 11 just happened to stir the stack in such a way that the Skimmer’s absent parameters lined up exactly the wrong way, triggering the numerical nuke.
A Careless Whisper (of Uninitialized Variables)
Silent’s fix? Add the missing parameters. Essentially, teach the Skimmer to stand on its own two (virtual) wheels again. Problem solved. It’s so simple, so mundane—like patching up a cosmic wormhole with duct tape—which somehow makes the story all the more magical.Rockstar’s own later releases, like the Xbox version and the Definitive Edition, apparently did slap a similar patch on. Silent, with characteristic thoroughness (and a healthy sense of pride), notes his fix is actually a bit more accurate—because when it comes to resurrecting old, weird bugs, there’s no room for half measures.
The Real Punchline: Sometimes, It’s Just Luck
This whole saga is a glittering testament to why validating your data and initializing your variables isn’t just best practice—it’s the digital equivalent of not letting your toddler operate heavy machinery. San Andreas, brilliant though it is, has always played a little fast and loose here. The Skimmer issue was lying in wait, ready to break not just immersion but the very laws of physics at the first opportunity.Ironically, despite the modern OS updates being fingered as the culprit, this bug could’ve surfaced on Windows 10, 7, XP, maybe even on a potato running Windows 98. The universe simply hadn’t rolled those dice until now. Sometimes, it’s not the codebase that changes, but the luck of the (memory) draw.
Lessons from the Stratosphere
In the tradition of great explorers, Silent’s journey reminds us that sometimes the most interesting bugs aren’t the ones that are new, but the ones that dinosaurs left behind. For every visible glitch, there could be a lost Skimmer somewhere—quiet, waiting for just the wrong update to send someone flying.If you’re a coder, take heed: test your assumptions. Validate your data. And for goodness’ sake, never assume a plane is a boat. If you’re a gamer, be grateful for the SilentPatches of the world, keeping our virtual worlds slightly less likely to collapse into absurdity—unless, of course, we’re talking about GTA, where absurdity is half the fun.
Source: PC Gamer A Windows 11 update revealed a 2-decade old bug in GTA: San Andreas that yeets CJ at '1.087 quadrillion light years' into the stratosphere
Last edited:
