A Windows 11 update revealed a 2-decade old bug in GTA: San Andreas.

The latest Windows 11 update has revealed a curious, long-forgotten system flaw in the game GTA: San Andreas, a glitch for which CJ is taken trillions upon trillions of light-years out into the cosmos if he attempts to board a seaplane. The Skimmer, from Vice City, had silently been faulty for nearly two decades. Although the role of the Skimmer shifted from boat to plane in San Andreas, Rockstar never fixed its handling abilities. The result is a vehicle without essential physics features incompatible with modern systems, particularly since the Windows 11 24H2 update.

In the earlier versions of Windows, such irregularities in memory management were kept under wraps. With the most recent update, if you use the Skimmer, it throws CJ out of the game world at ridiculous speeds, since uninitialized memory fills in faulty data for the physics engine.

The eternal GTA modder and notorious bug fixer, Silent, made the move to fix the issue, before testing: “I then used the script to spawn a Skimmer and put CJ inside it,” writes Silent, “just to be launched 1.0287648030984853e+0031 = 10.3 nonillion meters, or 10.3 octillion kilometres, or 1.087 quadrillion light-years up in the sky.”

Placing the needed vehicle and flight flags into the game’s settings turned the Skimmer into a real aircraft rather than a super-fast spaceship. Players can install SilentPatch to get the fix, or, if they haven’t updated, make manual adjustments instead.

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