A decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has unexpectedly emerged following Microsoft's Windows 11 24H2 update, leaving players unable to access a popular in-game aircraft.
Players reported that after installing Windows 11 version 24H2 in October 2024, the Skimmer seaplane completely vanished from the game world. Attempts to spawn the vehicle using mods resulted in game crashes or bizarre glitches that launched players' characters astronomical distances into the sky.
The issue caught the attention of Silent, developer of the community patch SilentPatch, who investigated the mysterious disappearance. Through extensive debugging, Silent discovered the root cause: missing parameters in the game's vehicle configuration files dating back to the original 2004 release.
The bug originated when Rockstar Games reclassified the Skimmer from a boat in GTA Vice City to a plane in San Andreas, but failed to add required wheel scale parameters to its configuration. For nearly 20 years, the game inadvertently used random values stored in memory locations, which coincidentally worked - until now.
Minor changes to temporary stack memory handling in Windows 11 24H2 finally exposed this long-dormant flaw. When players attempted to enter the Skimmer, the game would freeze while trying to calculate rotor blade angles using invalid data.
"What's remarkable is how this issue remained hidden for so long," Silent wrote in a technical blog post. "The game was just 4 bytes away from triggering this bug even in Windows 10."
The bug has been fixed in some versions of the game, including the Xbox release and newer PC ports. Players using the classic PC version can either wait for an upcoming SilentPatch update or manually edit the vehicle configuration files to resolve the issue.
This unusual case highlights how subtle changes in modern operating systems can unexpectedly impact legacy software, exposing long-buried programming oversights that managed to stay hidden for decades through sheer coincidence.