And it's especially noticeable if you're coming from GTA Online, where other players attempt to shoot at you, run you over, or run you off the road every other minute.

That's a big part of its appeal now, too, more than a decade later. 'I'd jump in and get shot immediately and have to wait like three minutes to jump into the next round.' But with Multi Theft Auto he didn't have to worry about being killed constantly by skilled players. He downloaded it and gave it a shot, but it seemed impenetrable. 'At the time the big game was Counter-Strike,' he recalls. Dan started out as a Multi Theft Auto player back before San Andreas even came out - when the mod was available for GTA 3 and Vice City. I asked one of the MTA developers, a chemical engineer named Dan, to help me understand what makes this San Andreas multiplayer community tic.

(And for creative types, MTA has a map editor and an easier-to-learn scripting system.) SA-MP has fewer custom interfaces, quicker load times, worse synchronisation and overall performance, and more elaborate role-playing servers. The mods themselves differ in more subtle ways. SA-MP and MTA allow much larger player counts - sometimes several hundred, depending on the server - and in traditional PC gaming style offer up a long list of servers to choose from, each of which has its own rules, available game modes, and eccentricities. GTA Online puts up to 30 players on each server, and it doesn't let you choose the server. Where they differ, however, is in approach. They turn San Andreas into a persistent online multiplayer world that allows players to embark on the full gamut of GTA-like activities - killing sprees, racing, stunts, heists, running away from the police, and so on. SA-MP and MTA are both very similar to GTA Online at first glance. (To put a number on it, SteamSpy estimates over 1.2 million GTA 5 players in the past two weeks, with peak concurrent players consistently around 50,000.) Even the massively-popular GTA 5, replete with a sprawling online mode of its own that consistently puts it in Steam's top 10 games by player count, fares no better than its ancestor. They put many of the biggest current PC games to shame.

These certainly aren't numbers to be sneezed at. I went to talk to members of both mod communities to find out what keeps them playing. Its two most popular online multiplayer mods currently have a million or more active players between them - one, Multi Theft Auto, had 616,000 players in July (up from just 33k in February 2010), while the other, SA-MP, oscillates between about 15,000 and 50,000 concurrent players. It may be two Grand Theft Auto generations and 11 years old, but GTA: San Andreas is still very much alive.

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