Rockstar games have a reputation for their incredible attention to detail.
And it turns out the detail goes further than many may have thought, with 2004’s GTA San Andreas using real-life gang members to do voice recording for characters in the game.
According to an interview with former Rockstar developer Lazlow Jones on Kinda Funny Games, the company would always fly out to record people with the accents they needed, stating if they required “specific accents or languages, we’d travel to those places.”
This was the same when it came to recording gangsters for GTA San Andreas, one of the most popular video games ever made. In order to get the most authentic voice over possible, the team “recruited” “real gang members” to do voiceover work. Jones said, “We showed them the scripts and they were like ‘we wouldn’t say that, we wouldn’t say that, we’d say this.” It happened so often that he just told them to “say what you would say.”
GTA San Andreas is the best-selling game on the PS2, selling 17.33million copies worldwide.
Its story revolves around CJ, a former member of the Grove Street Families gang pulled back into the life after his mother is killed. It created several controversies due to its extreme violence and the discovery of a cut sex minigame in its source code.
In its future work for Red Dead Redemption 2, Jones says the team would still would fly to locations where the voices they needed could be found. They flew to New Mexico to record Native Americans and New Orleans to record Creole people because “those accents you just can’t get right with New York, LA actors.”
In other news, you may be able to play some PS3 games on the PS5 soon, but don’t go retiring your old console just yet, as it will only be “select” games that make the cut.