Not too long ago, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about VR, and how the company is cautious about jumping in on the fad until it is more established. Soon after, L. A. Noire: The VR Case Files was released, showing that they're not that adamant about caution, and now it seems that Take-Two has been courting virtual reality for years — Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has just been announced for the Oculus Quest 2.
Coming hot off the heels of the recent announcement that Facebook is being rebranded as Meta, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that San Andreas is heading to the company's latest virtual reality platform. While various GTA games had had fan-made VR mods crop up over the years, there has never been any official way to play any title in the series in virtual reality.
San Andreas seems like an odd choice at first glance — GTA 5 already has a first person mode baked into the game, and being more recent, is probably easier to update with VR functionality. Some rumors suggest that the Expanded and Enhanced ports coming next March will have VR features, but none of that is confirmed yet.
However, San Andreas is a great choice if you think about it. Of the 3D era games, it sported the most RPG-lite elements which helped make the game world all the more immersive, which is a key element of VR. Being an older game, it's also easier on the hardware — we imagine GTA 5 in VR would make even modern rigs sweat. Finally, San Andreas is an absolute classic that is still regarded by large swaths of the fandom to be the best the 3D era has to offer, if not the entire franchise altogether.
That said, this is a vision we still need to wait a while on. No release date or further details were revealed at the event. Even so, Zuckerberg did state that Facebook has been trying to get a classic GTA title onto one of its VR platforms for years, meaning this project has been cooking in the oven a fair amount already.
If we were betting folk, we'd probably put our money on GTA: San Andreas for Oculus Quest 2 launching in the latter half of 2022 at the earliest. In the meantime, you'll be able to hop into a visually overhauled version of San Andreas as part of The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition, launching on the 11th of November.
