Windows 11 24H2 Update Uncovers a 20-Year-Old Hidden Bug in GTA: San Andreas

The recent Windows 11 24H2 update has unexpectedly brought an old bug back to life in the legendary game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In a twist of irony, the bug had been lurking in the game's code since its original PC release in 2005, but had remained hidden and harmless until now, according to a report by Tom’s Hardware.

Following the update, players noticed something strange: the Skimmer seaplane had vanished from the game. It wouldn’t appear anywhere in the world, and even cheat codes failed to summon it — as if San Andreas had erased all memory of the aircraft's existence.

Curious about the disappearance, developer and gaming enthusiast Adrian dug deeper. His investigation revealed that the Skimmer was, quite literally, missing when GTA: San Andreas ran on Windows 11 24H2. The culprit? A longstanding error in the vehicles.ide file, which defines the attributes of every vehicle in the game.

Adrian discovered that the line specifying the Skimmer was missing several critical parameters. This omission led to uninitialized variables in the game's code — variables whose behavior could change depending on how the operating system handled memory.

In previous versions of Windows, from Windows 98 up to Windows 11 23H2, the system consistently assigned values that allowed the Skimmer to function without issues. But the 24H2 update introduced new memory management rules, causing these variables to generate extremely large, invalid values — effectively "breaking" the Skimmer’s existence.

Fortunately, Adrian provided a quick manual fix. Players can simply open the vehicles.ide file located in the game's data folder and manually add the missing parameters (-1, 0.7, 0.7, 0.7, -1) to line 460, which corresponds to the Skimmer. This patch restores the seaplane back into the game, letting players once again take to the skies.