GTA 5's character-swapping system was a stroke of genius that was supposed to feature in San Andreas 9 years earlier—this masterclass mod makes that dream a reality

As I flitted between Peter Parker and Miles Morales boroughs-apart in Spider-Man 2's New York City, I thought: why haven't more games copied the character-swapping system from GTA 5?

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 first swung onto PS5 consoles towards the end of 2023, and breached the shores of Steam at the beginning of this year. Grand Theft Auto 5, on the other hand, followed the same two-year console-to-desktop pilgrimage a full decade earlier.

That first time switching between Michael or Franklin or Trevor was a wonderful feeling, as the camera moved skyward, birds-eye-view and in slow-motion, before darting in a different direction across the map and landing back at ground level; you now in control of someone else altogether.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a game that comes close to the same feeling and masterful execution of the mechanic besides Insomniac's Spidey sequel. Back in 2013, it was a watershed moment for the Grand Theft Auto series as a whole.

Not only was it cool, it was the first time we were able to guide different playable protagonists through missions and swap paths on the fly—something that lent itself well to GTA 5's often open-ended and chaotic mission structure in story mode, and something that wouldn't necessarily have worked quite as well in the darker, more brooding GTA 4.

Way back in 2004, however, GTA San Andreas was originally planned to include multiple characters and, similarly, an on-the-fly character-switching system. And while this discovery was first made by Silent on GTA Forums years later in 2012, modder Kaizo's latest project, Real Multiple Protagonists, is the first to fully implement the system properly as per Rockstar's original still-present source code.

"GTA: San Andreas' native two-player mode lets you switch characters, but this requires not only knowing how the two-player mode works on the surface, but also digging into the code, removing its limitations, patching validations so that the game treats player two not as a co-op character, but as another fully independent player entity," Kaizo explains. "And to clarify, this isn't some trick on my part, the mechanic of assigning CJ's priorities to another player entity is already natively present in Rockstar's code but unused."

Here we go again, again

Having launched on consoles during the PS2/Xbox era, GTA: San Andreas was already pushing the bounds of its hardware upon arrival. Throwing not only another playable protagonist into the mix, but also real-time character switching, ultimately proved too ambitious.

Kaizo's project, then, offers a glimpse of what could have been and is still genuinely impressive despite its aged source material. "Unfortunately, there is no mission code—and there never will be," explains Kaizo. Real Multiple Protagonists is designed to work in free roam mode only. Which isn't to say bringing it to life wasn't without its technical challenges.

Kaizo adds: "The top-down camera transition is definitely the best way to switch characters across different cities; it would have been amazing to see in SA. But here's the catch: GTA SA's camera can't be raised that high because of its limited draw distance."

The good news is that draw distance mods can solve this. "In my Real Multiple Protagonists mod, I used the GTA 5-style aerial transition as inspiration," Kaizo says. "If you combine it with a draw distance mod, you can capture that same magic. Without it, though, all you'd get is a 'blue blob' of sky during the switch."

Real Multiple Protagonists really started with another mod of Kaizo's. "Before this mod, I worked on one called 2 Player Deluxe, which removed a lot of the native limitations from SA's co-op mode. Ironically, while updating that mod, I accidentally stumbled across the mechanic that Silent had first documented. Until then, neither he nor anyone else had mentioned that the function 'CWorld::PlayerInFocus' is what strips CJ of his priorities and assigns them to another player entity.

"At first, I thought: 'Wow, this is broken and unplayable,' just like Silent thought . But then I figured: 'Well, nobody really cares about two-player mode anyway, so let's see how far I can take this.' That accident became the foundation for Real Multiple Protagonists. Ironically again, I ended up abandoning the 2 Player Deluxe update completely to build this instead, and to this day, 2PDX hasn't had another update!"

Kaizo stresses that despite the logistical hurdles of bringing Real Multiple Protagonists to life, he enjoyed the whole process. "Nothing about it was frustrating," he says, while outlining the fact he had to manually recreate each behavior of the new playable character step by step. Kaizo describes that part as "really satisfying", which speaks to his infectious, seemingly unwavering enthusiasm.

"The hardest part, if I had to pick one, was definitely the camera transition," he does concede, however. "San Andreas doesn't have a native way to tilt the camera downward while dynamically moving in a direction. If you look at Rockstar's own credit sequences, you'll see they even struggled to wrangle the camera.

"The most time-consuming part, though, was the UI. Specifically, the wheel menu was inspired by GTA 5. I had to use an 'image masking' technique to keep the PNGs inside the circular frame. It sounds simple, but with San Andreas' limitations, it took weeks. Even after release, I kept tweaking it with updates."

From the outside looking in, one particularly endearing feature of Kaizo's work is the simple fact that, by his own admission, a broad sample of GTA players are only now discovering San Andreas' native two-player mode via the mod itself. This has been matched by a deluge of positive feedback for Real Multiple Protagonists from San Andreas players old and new—something Kaizo reckons illustrates the power of modding itself, while also underlining the enduring appeal of Rockstar's 2004 hit all these years down the line.

To that end, Kaizo says: "Modders show more care than Rockstar, who often rely on nostalgia. The thing is, San Andreas still has huge potential, even today. New mods keep it alive and fresh. For me, it's fun to add things nobody thought possible in San Andreas—a game that'll always stay relevant, like Mario 64. It hit the sweet spot of content, freedom, and accessibility to everyone that newer games just can't replace."