GTA SA cheat codes discovery timeline
In YYYY-MM-DD format
2004-10
Initial cheat codes released on some sites, such as GTANet’s GTA San Andreas site. These only consist of cheat codes from GTA VC/GTA 3 that still works in GTA SA, as Rockstar hadn’t released any cheat codes yet.
These include: all weapon sets, health-armor-$250k, lower wanted level, raise wanted level 2 stars, commit suicide, have a bounty on your head, peds attack each other, everyone is armed, faster clock, faster gameplay, slower gameplay, sunny weather, very sunny weather, overcast, foggy, rain, perfect handling, all green lights, aggressive drivers, drive on water, destroy all cars, black traffic, pink traffic, boats fly, spawn Rhino, spawn Rancher, spawn Caddy, spawn Hotring A, spawn Hotring B, spawn Bloodring Banger, spawn Stretch, spawn Romero, and spawn Trashmaster
2004-12-17
IGN, along with some other sites, published some new cheat codes that were officially released by Rockstar
These include: beach party, get parachute, huge bunny hop, max muscle, spawn Monster, spawn Stunt Plane, and smash-and-boom
2004-12-18
IGN once again published some new cheat codes, straight from Rockstar
These include: mega jump, max fat, skinny, spawn Quad, spawn Hydra, spawn Vortex
Lots of these codes have hit the streets, but there are still more. The bad news is that they’ve been hidden from the public. The good news is that we have some new ones right here. A good selection of bizarre and useful tricks that’ll send Carl Johnson soaring to new heights. You ready to fly? Here we go.
2005-01-08
Edisoncarter found some new cheat codes using a DIY setup to brute-force the hashes. Brute-forcing with this method was rather slow, so only a few cheat codes were found each week. His results can be found here.
These include: cars fly, traffic is fast cars, free aim while driving, and all taxis have nitrous
I found them by scanning codes at high speed. I wired up a game pad to a PC’s parallel port using optocouplers.
-edisoncarter
There are actually two “cars fly” cheat codes that he found (see below). The former was discovered earlier but he replaced it with the latter because “it’s easier to enter”.
Initial cheat code: :S: :D: :L2: :U: :L1: :C: :U: :X: :L:
New cheat code: :U: :D: :L1: :R1: :L1: :R: :L: :L1: :L:
2005-01-09
Edisoncarter found some more new cheat codes
These include: infinite lung capacity, spawn Dozer, gangs control the streets, reduced traffic, and orange sky
2005-01-11
Edison found the mega punch cheat code.
2005-01-13
Edison found the gang members everywhere cheat code.
Manu, a user on GTAReactor found the “all green lights” cheat code. Where they got this cheat code from is unknown.
It almost seems like a habit, but again there is a new cheat to GTA: San Andreas, this time sent by Manu. Thanks a lot for this!
-rough translation of this page.
2005-01-15
Edison found two more cheat codes, funhouse theme and sandstorm.
2005-01-17
Edison’s DIY brute-force setup gained some publicity from the media. Slashdot and Joystiq (now Engadget) were some of the sites covering this.
glengineer writes
“Gotta love edisoncarter for his cheesy, brute force, and effective hack of the PS2 controller to discover cheats for Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas. He used the parallel port of his PC connected to relays on the PS2 controller to step thru the combinations of button pushing needed to obtain cheats that were not released by Rockstar.”
-Slashdot post
Rockstar released some cheats for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas around when it was released. Since then, various other cheats have appeared including a very amusing jetpack spawn that I abuse regularly.
I’ve often wondered how the cheats were found, and this page of GTA: SA cheats explains at the end. One clever person has hooked a PS2 controller to his PC and got it to send button combinations to the game. Hence, so many cool cheats have been found for the game that Rockstart [sic] never released. Ingenious.
-Engadget post
2005-01-19
Edison found the “country traffic” cheat code
2005-01-22
Edison found the “cars float away when hit” cheat code
2005-01-31
Edison found the “adrenaline mode” cheat code
2005-02-02
Edison found the “recruit anyone (9mm)” cheat code
2005-02-10
Edison found the “ninja theme” cheat code
2005-02-21
Edison found the “never wanted” and “six star wanted level” cheat codes
2005-03-08
Edison found the “slut magnet” cheat code
2005-03-10
Edison found the “never get hungry” cheat code
2005-03-14
Edison found the “always midnight” and “recruit anyone (rockets)” cheat codes
2005-03-22
Edison found the “do nothing” cheat code
2005-03-24
Edison found the “infinite health” cheat code
2005-03-25
Edison found the “hookers pay you” cheat code.
2005-03
Tips & Tricks Magazine published some new cheat codes along with a “mystery” cheat code, all straight from Rockstar. They said that the cheat code “didn’t do what they were told it was going to do”, and it turned out to be the intended cheat code for “all taxis have nitrous”, which was already discovered by Edison 2 months earlier (albeit with a different combination due to hash collisions). Other cheat codes that were released include “Elvis is everywhere” and the intended cheat code for “never get hungry”.
All taxis have nitrous
Edison’s cheat code: :U: :X: :T: :X: :T: :X: :S: :R2: :R:
Intended cheat code: :U: :L: :L: :D: :C: :S: :L1: :L1: :L2: :R1: :R2:
Never get hungry
Edison’s cheat code: :S: :L2: :R1: :T: :U: :S: :L2: :U: :X:
Intended cheat code: :U: :D: :D: :L: :R: :L1: :L1: :L2: :R1: :R1: :R2:
It also contained an interview with Craig Filshie, the game’s lead level designer.
T&T: Are there any cheat codes that haven’t yet been released or discovered?
CF: One enterprising player [edisoncarter] hooked a third-party PlayStation 2 controller to his computer and programmed it to input random button combinations. Ingenious… and with that method he discovered a number of cheats. There are still some to unearth, however, so keep looking!
Nope, I’ve checked out issue 121 on Retromags, which was uploaded only recently, and there’s no mentions of interviews or mystery SA cheat codes. Must be from issue 120 (February 2005), which hasn’t been uploaded yet, sadly.
2005-05-03
Skiller and CMX found the 12 last unknown cheat codes. We dubbed this the “L1 cheat codes” since every single one of them ends with L1 due to the brute-force method they used.
Most of these cheat codes are 12 buttons long and can be substituted with the alternative ones: Riot mode, Spawn Hunter, Spawn Tanker, All cars have nitros, Max all vehicle stats, Hitman in all weapons, Max respect, Max sex appeal, Traffic is cheap cars, overcast weather, Peds attack you with guns, Country traffic + Born 2 Truck outfit, and Infinite ammo. The tool and its source code were available for download but the links are now dead and no one seems to have reuploaded it.
Supposedly, it was claimed that all the cheat codes have been found, but in fact, it’s not! It turns out that the overcast weather cheat code they found has the exact same hash as the original one, so it didn’t count. The cheat code they missed was the thunderstorm cheat code, that they actually found, but misinterpreted as another rainy weather cheat code when in fact it’s an entirely different one since it has its own cheat ID (although both seem to have the same effect) so it was ignored.
2005-05-07
All the L1 cheat codes have been found, and Skiller uploaded the cheat code dump file to GTAForums. Unfortunately their tool didn’t work properly and dumped 13 button results (which doesn’t work in the PS2 version as it only stores the last 12 button presses), preventing further progress and it was never fixed so they never found the rest of the cheat code combinations.
A post on GTASanAndreas.net wrote:
If all goes well, perhaps we will soon have all the working combinations. At this tempo (17159*12) that should be well over 200,000 working combinations! Don’t forget these are not all unique cheat codes, it simply means there are 200,000+ combinations for the 91 in-game cheats.
Which is true. I’ve managed to find all of them and there are 205,586 working combinations in total.
2005-06-08
Just two days after the game’s release on PC and Xbox, edisoncarter managed to find all the PC cheat codes, albeit in the short code form (e.g. HESOYAM) as the intended cheat codes hadn’t been found yet, except the spawn Hunter (OHDUDE) and Hydra (JUMPJET) as those are already the shortest ones.
2005-06-23
Last edited date of edisoncarter’s PC cheats thread. Some of the intended cheat codes have been found but many were still missing.
2015-03-13
Fast forward to 2015, nick7, a user on GTAForums posted a pair of intended cheats they found for PC: ThugsArmoury and NuttersToys. They noted these codes have a similarity to the ProfessionalsKit cheat code and GTA VC’s ThugsTools, ProfessionalsTools and NuttersTools cheat codes.
2015-03-31
Alexander Blade, another GTAForums user, hinted the presence of all the intended PC cheat codes in the Android version.
2015-04-01
Alexander Blade hinted the location of the intended cheat codes in the Android version.
2015-04-06
Deji found the intended Spawn Rhino cheat code (TimeToKickAss)
Alexander Blade published all the intended PC cheat codes hidden in the Android version of the game. By the time he published this, it’s been almost 10 years since edisoncarter’s last edit to the PC cheats thread.
2015
tuxxor/rot13’s cheat code finder was released. So far this is the only SA cheat code finder that’s available on the internet.