4 days ago, the WR was the 5 month old run from Piturrete in 2h50m56s. Now this new AJS trick has caused the leaderboard to split.
I've long been fascinated by GTA San Andreas speedruns because of how thoroughly broken they are from the routing standpoint. It's probably the most action-packed 3-4-hour speedrun of all time - during nearly every single mission something ridiculous happens, and for the vast majority of the runtime the game is kept in a precarious state where one wrong step usually means a crash and a game over. It's truly a spectacle, especially at marathons where the couch barely has time to explain stuff while it's happening. Go give it a watch, truly, you won't regret it if you like long categories. This is the most up-to-date run of it at a big marathon that I could find.
8 months ago AJS was also discovered in the Definitive Edition remaster. The setup is completely different, but the result is the same - skipping straight to the final mission. The impact on the community was the same: everyone rushed to do it once for the novelty, but because Definitive Edition is an absolute botch job of a port almost no one kept playing it afterwards.
And now, the Holy Grail has been achieved - a setup for a very similar glitch was found in the OG PC release. However, it's completely different to both the WinStore and DE versions, and the sequence of actions needed to achieve it is, frankly, the most thorough destruction of a videogame I've ever seen. It's a culmination of almost every glitch discovered by the SA community up to this point.
I will now describe the route, step by step, as simply as I can, just so you see what I mean.
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Start a new game. Run over a drug dealer to get some cash. Immediately go into a horse betting shop and play until you win $10000. Thankfully, the horse racing minigame can be cheesed - you can bet on the biggest underdog, wait until it gets into the lead at any point in the race, then pausebuffer until the race ends and you win. The money is needed to buy a specific safehouse later. Also, don't win too much money, you'll learn why later.
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Play the first few missions normally.
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Before starting Tagging Up Turf (the 3rd mission of the game), execute the "On-Mission 0" glitch via the Pimping submission. In short, this will allow us to "duplicate" (or "dupe") a mission, running two of them at once. This is the foundational tech upon which the entire normal Any% run is built. In 99% of cases doing this to a mission crashes the game, but the community has identified specific places where it doesn't. This is one of them.
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During dual-Tagging Up Turf, execute the "GOTO 0" glitch. This is one of the most recent big discoveries. Again, keeping it very short: a specific sequence of actions during the cutscene where Sweet sprays the first tag (the timing is frame-perfect) "restarts the game" (or, more accurately, starts it a second time). We see the intro cutscene and again take control of CJ in Jefferson where the game begins. There are now two copies of the main script running at the same time, with independent progression. This causes a lot of side effects, which we will exploit during the run (the one we do not, but is still funny, is that there are now two CJs running around on the map, and our control inputs apply to both, albeit the second one is the "primary" one that we use later).
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Progress the "original" script by doing missions up until Drive-By, when we execute the "0-Star glitch". Again, won't go into technical details, but it means we cannot get wanted stars anymore for the rest of the run. Again, we'll see why we need it later.
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Buy the Jefferson safehouse with the money we earned on horse betting. Ideally we shouldn't have a lot of money left after this. Get the NRG-500 superbike from its carpark spawn and store it in the Grove Street garage. We'll need it at the very end.
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While you're driving the NRG, do some stunt jumps. First major side effect of the GOTO 0 glitch: doing stunt jumps loses you money now, including driving into the negatives (which there's normally no way to do at this point in the game). We need to lose money to roughly $-1050, again a setup for later.
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Go to the Jefferson safehouse and save. Second major side effect of GOTO 0: instead of getting teleported to just outside the save marker like normal, after saving you get warped to a different save marker entirely. All save markers in the game are sequentially numbered in the script, and every save in the GOTO 0-affected state TPs you to the next one on the list. We need to get to Las Venturas for the next step, and it just so happens that 5 positions after the Jefferson safehouse on this list is the Prickle Pine safehouse, which is close to where we need to go next. So just walk into the save marker 5 times, then navigate to the exit inside an empty void (since the game warped us to an unloaded interior world, so every marker/interactable entity is there, but the environment isn't) and outside into Las Venturas. This is why we needed the 0-star glitch: we're now in the part of the map we haven't unlocked, so normally we'd have SWAT chase after us. Not today, though.
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Go to the Casino Floor (an unremarkable casino on the ourskirts of the city) and walk to the Wheel of Fortune table.
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This is where the main "magic" of this route happens. We're about to "program" two instructions that we'll need the game to execute at the end of the run: one just waits 15 seconds for safety, and the other jumps the script to to the line corresponding to starting End of the Line Part 3. To do this, we use bets at the casino table. Because we have negative money when we shouldn't be able to, the betting limits break and we can bet as much as we want, even more than the maximum achievable through normal gameplay. We need to make 3 extremely specific bets at the specific spots on the table to set the variables in memory just right. Here, a bunch of real-time math needs to be done to determine how to get to those amounts (since you can only adjust your bet up and down, and the increments are fucked due to the glitches).
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Once the correct bets are placed, leave the casino and return back to Los Santos to continue progressing the story (the "original" script). The next mission, OG Loc, can be duped using the same Pimping method to complete it twice and skip the next in the chain, Running Dog. Then, do Wrong Side of the Tracks normally.
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Finally, all that setup we've done will begin to pay off and we're about to do the actual AJS. To start, start Pimping, pick up a passenger and then wait for the 3-minute timer to end (it's important to not cancel it since it will mess with the variables we've spent step 10 setting up).
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Go back to Grove Street and prepare to start Big Smoke (yes, the 1st mission of the game, created by the duplicate main script we created by the GOTO 0 glitch).
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Play a replay (this is important, no idea why), start Big Smoke. Then fail the mission by drowning your bike in a lake. Do this 7 more times.
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Because you're naturally going to receive a phone call from the "original" script, you can do another setup to make it so you answer the call, but remain in a state where you can start missions. Do that, then start Big Smoke an 8th time. Skip the first cutscene (inside CJ's house), and during the second one where they get into the Perennial, hang up the call. You now have control of CJ inside the cutscene. This is yet another trick that's done in normal any% all the time.
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The next goal is to get inside the Binco clothes shop nearby while still in the cutscene. To do so, get into Ryder's Picador and reverse your way to the shop. This is important because the trigger for the mission advancing is CJ accelerating in a vehicle, so we can't do that. Note that the camera is stuck where the cutscene should've ended, so you'll have to navigate to the shop somewhat blindly.
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Once inside the shop (again in an black void, since the game can't load the correct interior inside the cutscene), go to the changeroom. This will bring up the apparel menu.
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Click LMB or press Space. Due to the way the PC version of SA is basically emulating the PS2 controller under the hood, both of them are equivalents of the X button on the DualShock. X is also "accelerate" while in a vehicle. This will finally trigger the Big Smoke cutscene to progress and warp us to the cemetery, near the bikes, where the actual mission starts. Again, in a black void, because world loading is broken.
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Enter to the 24-7 shop nearby, somehow keeping your bearings in the void while you navigate there. We only need it to then exit it straight away and finally make the outside world load properly so we can see what's going on.
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Enter a vehicle. Note that the Binco apparel menu is still here the entire time, and we need to be careful to keep it up, so not exit it or select anything. This means we cannot brake in vehicles (since this is Circle on the DualShock, which will dismiss the menu) and, once we start accelerating (X on DualShock), never let go or else we advance the menu. To enter a vehicle, press Space (X) intentionally once to advance the menu, then F/Enter (Triangle) to both enter and go back one layer of the menu so we're back to where we were.
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In this state, never letting go of acceleration and braking using the handbrake, go to Grove Street.
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Grab the NRG-500 that we stored here all the way back in step 6 from the garage and (still obeying the same rules regarding the apparel menu) go the Ganton gym and position the bike in a very specific way, so that we can quickly get on it when we teleport there later.
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Once done, leave the NRG there and go, on foot, to the nearest dance club.
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Start the dance minigame. Then immediately press Enter to quit the apparel menu and regain control of CJ while inside the minigame (yes, this is the entire reason for all the apparel menu shenanigans earlier). Exit the club.
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Walk all the way to Big Smoke's house, to the marker starting the mission Just Business (from the original script).
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While you walk, a phone call will ring explaining you the gym mechanic in SA. As part of that, it will briefly show you the Ganton gym. This cutscene also warps CJ to its location, albeit off camera.
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Answer the call, then walk into the Just Business marker that has temporarily deactivated. As you get warped to the gym, notice that we have control of both CJ and the camera inside the cutscene - this is the consequence of the dance minigame trick we did earlier and the entire reason for steps 16-24. Immediately get on the NRG that you placed here earlier.
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Now you have a very limited amount of time (until the gym cutscene ends and warps you back) to drive the NRG to Grove Street and enter the marker ending Big Smoke (remember, that mission is still running). As in, you have maybe 1/3 of a second of room to spare. You will likely hit the marker as the gym cutscene is fading out.
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The gym cutscene's end will warp you back to the Just Business marker, and the phonecall will give you back control of CJ. Immediately start Just Business. Now we have two missions (Big Smoke and Just Business) from different mission scripts running on top of each other. This is an extremely cursed state where the game can be manipulated to do weird things, and this is where the magic happens.
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Wait a second in the Just Business cutscene, then skip it. If at this point the game somehow didn't crash, then congratulations, you did everything right! Now just fail Just Business by blowing up Big Smoke's car and the game will execute the instructions we've set up in step 10. It will wait 15 seconds, then start End of the Line Part 3.
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Do the final mission as normal. And now you can beat GTA San Andreas PC version in roughly an hour instead of 3, at the expense of what remains of your sanity.
