Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is a 2004 open world action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North in the United Kingdom and published by Rockstar Games. It is the third 3D game in the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise, the fifth original console release and eighth game overall. Originally released for the PlayStation 2 in October 2004, the game has since been released for the Xbox and Microsoft Windows in June 2005, then released on the Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360 in October 2008, then released on the PlayStation Store via PSN for the PlayStation 3 in December 2012, and has received wide acclaim and high sales figures on all platforms. It is the best-selling game of all time on PlayStation 2. It was made available on Steam on January 4, 2008, and on Intel-based Macs running a minimum of Mac OS X 10.6.6 in September 2011. San Andreas was released for the PlayStation 3 via PlayStation Network in December 2012. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was succeeded by Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and was preceded by Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
The game is set in the semi-fictional state of San Andreas (based on California and Nevada), which contains three metropolitan cities: Los Santos, based on Los Angeles, San Fierro, based on San Francisco, and Las Venturas, based on Las Vegas. Set in 1992, San Andreas revolves around the gang member Carl "CJ" Johnson returning home from Liberty City to Los Santos, San Andreas, after learning of his mother's murder. CJ finds his old friends and family in disarray. Over the course of the game, CJ gradually unravels the plot behind his mother's murder.
The high-level plot of the game is based on multiple real-life events in Los Angeles including the rivalry between street gangs the Bloods and Crips (which the player's gang and rival gang are spoofed off of), the Crack epidemic (which is shown as a major point of conflict in the game), the LAPD Rampart scandal (forming the basis of several main antagonists in the game), and the game even culminates in a spoof of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
