Anyone who’s beaten GTA San Andreas will remember the tense atmosphere at the end of the game: streets ablaze, people running with TVs on their backs, and the feeling that the city had turned into a battlefield.
You can check out my full interview with Young Maylay in the player below:
But what many people don’t know is that, for Young Maylay, that wasn’t just a video game script. It was his real life.
Qual o seu protagonista favorito do GTA 6?
In our conversation, the man behind CJ recalled the LA Riots (the 1992 Los Angeles riots) and explained how that moment shaped the game’s authenticity.
"It wasn’t cool, it was chaotic"
A lot of people watch videos from that time and think the looting and chaos looked like an action movie, but Maylay was very direct in giving me the perspective of someone who was there:
"It was chaotic. It was confusion. It was uncertainty… people on the outside might think it’s fun, seeing people running into stores and stuff, but it’s very chaotic and it’s not cool."
He described an atmosphere of real fear, where no one knew what would happen the next day. For him, that was one of the darkest moments in Los Angeles history.
The truth behind Frank Tenpenny from GTA San Andreas
One of the things that struck me most in the interview was when he talked about the police. In GTA San Andreas, the villain Tenpenny represents corruption and abuse of power. According to Maylay, Rockstar didn’t invent any of that from scratch.
He stated that everything in the game is a faithful reflection: "Everything in that game was authentic… That’s why you have the corrupt cops with Tenpenny." The game served as a platform to expose a reality that he and many other young Black people in L.A. faced daily with the police of that era.
The secret to GTA San Andreas’ immersion
Maylay believes the game only became such an enduring success because Rockstar refused to release anything that wasn’t perfect in terms of atmosphere. They wanted to capture the “smell” and the “feel” of the city in that decade.
He mentioned that, for a brief moment (about a week or two), there was a rare sense of unity in the communities amid the chaos, but that it soon dissipated. This social complexity is what makes us feel that Los Santos is still alive today.
Check out: Exclusive: Interview with Young Maylay, the actor who played Carl Johnson (CJ) in GTA San Andreas
Do you like the Viciados Portal? We count on your support! To receive updates, follow us on Google News, Google Discover, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Join the discussion on Facebook, X (Twitter), and Instagram!
