'Ini Setiap Orang Harus Sendiri!' — Misi San Andreas yang Perlu Anda Mainkan Sebelum GTA 6

When Rockstar debuted its extended look at GTA 6 on Netflix, it was as if the developer had uploaded a one-off episode of a crime thriller to the platform. Sure, this was a gameplay reveal and there was certainly plenty of what was clearly a person playing a video game, but it nonetheless felt like a cinematic event. Compelling characters, building tension, slick action, and beautiful camera direction – it was as if Michael Mann had shadow-dropped a CGI short.

None of that will have come as a surprise. Rockstar has always had one eye on the movies – the game that shot it to stardom is a love-letter to Goodfellas, and its most recent open-world is the greatest Western never filmed. But the cinematic ambition we associate with the studio truly came to fruition in 2004 with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Its predecessors, GTA 3 and Vice City, had been packed with references to classic crime cinema and voiced by genuine Hollywood talent. But that wasn’t enough for San Andreas. For this ‘90s-set Californian epic, Rockstar wanted to put you in the movies. And so it designed missions that felt like they’d been pulled from the silver screen.

There’s no better example of this than Reuniting the Families, the penultimate chapter of San Andreas’ opening act. It’s a highly-scripted, expertly directed slice of interactive storytelling that casts you in the leading role. And by trading the freedom of its open world for a tighter, more authored experience, San Andreas makes this gripping getaway feel more dramatic than any story the series had told thus far.

It remains true even today that the vast majority of Grand Theft Auto’s missions take place outdoors. This is a series built on the city sandbox. One of its most appealing facets is that you’re free to go anywhere – every road, alley, and freeway is fair game. Causing trouble in that mass sprawl of concrete and asphalt was simply what GTA was during the first two games of the series’ 3D era, which for the most part only permitted you to come indoors when an NPC invited you in for a cutscene.

But the indoors offers something the open-world can't: Control. Direction. Oversight. Rooms and corridors are the perfect container for scenes and set-pieces, untouched by the continual simulation of metropolitan life. And so it’s no surprise that San Andreas, with its substantially loftier storytelling goals, frequently sends you into buildings all over its digital golden state. As Carl “CJ” Johnson, you stealthily murder your way through a music mogul’s mansion, steal rifles from a sleeping weapons hoarder, and rescue a damsel in distress from a burning condo – all moments that, thanks to a stronger guiding hand and purposeful level design, feel akin to playing through a movie scene.

That feeling peaks in Reuniting the Families, a turning point for the failing Grove Street gang. With the rival Ballas having practically overrun the city of Los Santos with its drug pushing operation, CJ’s brother Sweet decides it’s time to pull together the gang’s fractured families. He’ll meet the heads of the sets at the Jefferson Motel. CJ and fellow gang members Ryder and Smoke will accompany him, but remain outside while the negotiations take place. Soon, a rejuvenated Grove Street will strike back at their enemies and reclaim the streets.

If only crime were that simple. As soon as Sweet enters the building, the police turn up in force. Ryder and Smoke scarper – “It’s every motherf*cker for himself!” – but CJ heads into the motel to rescue his brother.

Confined by the complex’s small rooms and enclosed hallways, San Andreas suddenly transforms from an open-world playground into a third-person shooter. The motel’s layout functions akin to a level in a linear video game, its corridors guiding you forward through a series of pre-determined moments and combat encounters. The tense atmosphere this scripting creates is apparent from the moment you load in – a fellow Grove Street member is shot to pieces and sent flailing over the hall’s upper balcony. Another lies dead in the stairwell. A woman runs for her life. As you head on up to the main floor, you’re hit by an unexpected jump scare: a SWAT officer rolls through the door and opens fire. You’re about to enter a criminal's worst nightmare, a house of horrors where the law is waiting to pop out from behind every door.

The motel’s corridors are lined with invisible trigger points, each one kickstarting a unique scenario that turns a generic video game shootout into a cinematic vision of a building under siege. A civilian runs from one room to another, crossing your line of fire. A door blows off its hinges. Gangsters light up troopers as they crash through a skylight. An officer hangs from an air vent to take you by surprise. As you inch forward through this maze of rent-by-the-hour rooms, it becomes clear that each square foot of it has been painstakingly crafted to ensure every second of the ordeal feels ripped from the movies. Unlike the movies, though, there’s no guarantee that the hero will survive. You still need to demonstrate some skill to stay alive.

Thankfully, CJ is no slouch; he can combat roll just as good as a pig in kevlar. This is the tool that will shift you in and out of cover, taking you from safety to a perfect firing position in just a couple of incredibly cool seconds. And there is a lot of cover – not just the 90-degree corridor corners, but laundry baskets, sofas, and upturned tables. This is a cover shooter map built two years before Gears of War made chest-high walls a trend. Naturally, such an arrangement demands an appropriate weapon. Armed with the MP5 that his enemies drop, CJ becomes John McClaine, the motel his own miniature Nakatomi Tower. Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho.

After creating a small mountain of corpses, CJ finally reunites with Sweet and the pair make their escape. A rooftop showdown with a police helicopter would, in any other mission, act as the finale, but this isn’t any other mission. Sending the whirlybird to its doom is just the half way point. With every cop in the city on your tail, a lifeline is found in Smoke and Ryder, who suddenly pull up in getaway wheels. There’s no time to question where they’ve been or why they’ve returned to the scene of the bust. You hop in and call shotgun. Well, AK – you’ll need fully automatic fire for this one.

The mission’s second half sees the format shift from third-person shooter to on-rails turret sequence. And while the action has spilled out into the streets, the tight control allowed by an interior space remains: technically speaking, CJ is inside a car, its driver following Rockstar’s script to the letter. The journey is completely authored, and so it becomes a rollercoaster ride through Los Santos – the route specifically designed to take you through streets perfectly shaped for the oncoming storm.

Police cruisers give chase, their passengers pumping magazine after magazine into your car’s bodywork. Initially, you’re at the front of the pack, the boys in blue tailing behind, but that very quickly changes. Like a city-sized Disneyland dark ride, cops keep popping up on either side of the track – screeching out of alleyways or thundering through junctions. What begins as a simple “blast what’s behind you” becomes a 360-degree shooting gallery, demanding constant assessment of all angles for incoming threats.

The cops are on rails just the same as you are, which means you’re the sole dynamic component in this regimented excitement machine. And while you choose where the bullets go, almost every stunt has been planned – the train will always ram into one of the initial trio of interceptors, the first biker will always collide with its allied car. All pursuing vehicles have been primed to detonate, ensuring the whole ordeal is a chain of explosions triggered by just a few bullets. You’re the improvising actor on a perfectly choreographed action movie set.

If you’re going to make an interactive action movie for the PS2, then you nod to the greats while you’re doing it. A mid-chase cutscene introduces motorcycle-riding cops in a shot lifted directly from the 1997 Nick Cage classic, Con Air. As more bikers join the chase, they leap onto your car, just like the T-1000 did in Terminator 2. This kind of action is commonplace in a post-Uncharted world, but back in 2004, a cop hurling himself onto your motor and throwing a punch was one of the most exciting surprises San Andreas could throw at you.

A mission as grandly cinematic as this couldn’t simply end with the Grove Street boys getting away. A roadblock is easily surmounted by simply driving straight into the two officers, but as we’ve learned, the LSPD were trained at the Robert Patrick school of holding on tight. He’ll soon wish he’d let go. Smoke drives into a narrow alley, where a helicopter swoops in low, its spinning blades angled for the kill. The pedal hits the metal, and the officer is chewed up in what is surely one of the goriest moments in any GTA. The helicopter falls to earth, the boys in green bail out, and their getaway vehicle crashes through a nearby Sprunk billboard, dropping down onto the freeway where it smashes into a fuel truck. The giant explosion is, of course, mandatory.

Reuniting the Families frequently appears in conversations about the best San Andreas missions. It’s not difficult to see why. But it, and the design of San Andreas as a whole, is the starting point for one of Rockstar’s greatest challenges: how to balance the freeform simulation of a living, breathing open world with those cinematic ambitions. By the time of Red Dead Redemption 2, the gulf between these two styles became completely clear. While exploring its sandbox frontier, you’re given complete freedom to play your way. Your actions have consequences, of course, but that’s dictated by the simulation. When you’re on a mission, that freedom is almost completely taken away – in order to put you in the movie and tell the story it wants to, Rockstar needs you to follow the script to the letter. And as the possibilities offered by the developer’s open worlds have increased, the fact that those possibilities are stripped back during moments of storytelling creates a sharp contrast.

That’s not to say one side of Rockstar’s formula is better than the other. If nothing else, the fact that I’ve dedicated an entire article to how brilliant Reuniting the Families is should tell you that I’m a big fan of the studio’s approach to these cinematic story missions. They’re exciting. Thrilling. They have authorial intent. They put you in the goddamn movies! But, with any luck, GTA 6 will find a way to successfully marry the simulation and the story.

Even if it doesn’t, Reuniting the Families proves having two sides to a coin is a worthwhile pursuit, particularly if both halves of the whole are equally accomplished. San Andreas did amazing things with its city sandbox at the same time as creating linear missions that could be fantastic stealth infiltrations, home invasions, or explosive getaways across Los Santos. And it was those moments that really took us into CJ’s life. Those were the missions that made him feel like a real person with a story to tell. That time he saved Sweet from the cops? Man, it was absolute cinema.