Gtainside
Before Rockstar Games’ official online take on Los Santos & its surroundings made a splash with GTA Online in 2013, many PC players had been bringing mayhem to San Andreas beforehand, thanks to modifications that were anything but short in ambition.
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Long-time GTA fans may remember – or still play – hugely successful mods such as San Andreas Multiplayer (SA-MP) và Multi Theft tự động (MTA). Somehow, after all these years & against all odds, they’re still going strong and reeling in thousands of players each month – last year, nearly 4,000 SA-MP servers were active, with 25k to 40k players concurrently online on average. As for MTA, the current player count sits around 25k players online on 1,246 public servers at the time of this writing.
These numbers are especially surprising when we consider GTA Online, Rockstar’s official, triple-A alternative, has been running for nearly a decade now, becoming bigger và deeper with each major nội dung update.
For research purposes (and because I was feeling a bit nostalgic), I jumped into SA-MP earlier this month. Lớn my surprise, the numbers hadn’t changed much since last year’s reports. Granted, I was playing during the weekend, but it was amazing to see several free-roam và RP servers filled to lớn the brim with players who refuse to move on lớn flashier pastures.
And it’s easy lớn see why: there’s an inherent chaos lớn both SA-MP & MTA which can’t be replicated with an official online Grand Theft tự động hóa experience. We’re plenty familiar with fan-made modifications going absurdly massive và chaotic – it happens with single-player and online games alike – and San Andreas’ once-massive mở cửa world has long been the perfect playground for gamers & developers with too much time on their hands.
Even after 15 years or so, SA-MP & MTA are far from being robust experiences; these modifications are unstable, network problems are common, và the quality of the overall experience is highly dependent on the servers you choose to lớn play on. Regardless, it’s hard to lớn find multiplayer modifications as creative as the ones a ragtag team of modders – và literally everyone that wanted lớn help out – created slowly but steadily.
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San Andreas might be bursting at the seams when it loads up a heavily modified stunt hệ thống filled with custom assets, but 200 (or even 300!) players are having the time of their lives crashing into each other & finding new ways khổng lồ perform rad tricks. They may be lagging all over the place, but the performance, it seems, is part of the charm.
Another key lớn SA-MP & MTA’s long-lived success is how devs encouraged – và even supported – role-playing once the community started to lớn set up fairly complex servers with custom rulesets and commands. If you’re familiar with the modded RP servers on GTA Online that have become incredibly famous thanks lớn streamers, you should take a look at the origin of it all. In some players" eyes, the starting place is better than the finish line.
We tried to lớn reach out to both SA-MP & MTA developers, but they’ve not been very communicative. After all, the biggest minds behind them have come and gone, & few of the original devs (who have probably moved on with their lives và jobs) remain improving code and reworking ideas with no kết thúc in sight. When you take a look at the current state of development on both mods, the work structure appears khổng lồ be anything but centralized. Oddly enough, it’s proving khổng lồ be quite effective.
It’s not hard khổng lồ jump into an “official” (there are so many of them) Discord server & chat with moderators & veterans that can point you in the right direction. Dig too deep, & you’ll find plenty of dead ends, though. Things become funnier and more fascinating when you ask who’s in charge, since no one knows for sure. Power to lớn the people, I guess.
We can come up with a fairly reliable timeline of events for both modifications though. In the case of SA-MP, the revolutionary thủ thuật was born from progress on Vice city Multiplayer, released in April 2005. After a public beta, lead dev “kyeman” (later known as Kalcor) and his team moved on lớn work on San Andreas while another group of devs picked up VC-MP – this modification also proved to lớn be successful, but it was inevitably overshadowed by the bigger GTA.
Work on SA-MP moved quite fast despite the difficulties introduced by San Andreas’ vastly bigger world. After all, SA-MP was being built on đứng đầu of VC-MP’s structure, so a big part of the code was the same. The first playable release was launched in May 2006, yet a fairly stable build didn’t arrive until June 20, 2007. By the time SA-MP 0.2 was officially released, tools had been unleashed for modders và players to come up with new modes and custom servers.
Unsurprisingly, cheats and exploits arrived shortly afterwards, and quickly after the release of 0.2, the SA-MP team almost quit because they lacked the strength và ability to deal with people who just wanted lớn see San Andreas burn. In less than one day, however, a huge online petition gave them enough strength lớn crack down on cheaters, closing the main exploit và coming up with a built-in anti-cheat system. It was an impressive effort from a team Kalcor once described as “just a bunch of GTA fans who thought it would be fun to play Vice City and San Andreas as a multiplayer game.”
SA-MP continued to lớn be improved for years with smaller but much-needed updates, but its history gets fuzzier from 2008 onwards, with the main development team often quitting only khổng lồ return a few days later. As work on the massively popular modification progressed, it became abundantly clear the minds behind it were overwhelmed by the success of something that had started as an experimental project – Kalcor was finally done with SA-MP in 2019. Nowadays, development is fragmented at best, but servers abound, và the community still feels like a big family always mở cửa to help newcomers.
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On the other hand, Multi Theft Auto’s history started with GTA 3 before moving on lớn Vice City. Many players were surprised by its accessibility, và that’s a chất lượng the MTA development team kept close lớn their chest moving forward & into San Andreas. Moreover, the approach to lớn MTA always was mở cửa source, which allowed it lớn incorporate new ideas và improvements at a faster rate than SA-MP ever did.
In the long run, the “let’s build towards what the community wants” that dictated MTA’s development has paid off – SA-MP had a good run as the most popular modification, but currently feels like a remnant of an older age, whereas MTA has become the most cohesive & flexible multiplayer take on classic Grand Theft tự động hóa games.
Big Deathmatch and RP servers are still the go-to destinations for MTA players, but it’s mind-bending khổng lồ see entirely different maps và wacky modes, such as first-person horror survivals, running on a crusty engine from 2004 with relative ease. On đứng đầu of that, modular extras can be added to lớn customize one’s experience with MTA down to the tiniest detail.
As we look forward to lớn GTA6 – while burning down Los Santos over và over again in GTA Online to lớn make millions of e-bucks – we shouldn’t forget about the series’ unofficial multiplayer past. Looking at some of the more free-spirited modes released over the years, it’s abundantly clear that Rockstar has learned tons from it. Và – with the scene looking happier và healthier than ever in 2022 – perhaps the studio will continue to bởi vì so, too.
