100 LITTLE THINGS IN GTA 5 THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND
It’s a game where twilit moments of calm can be abruptly interrupted by… anything. A plane crash. A cougar attack. A police chase. And yet chaos and calm both feel right at home in Los Santos, Rockstar’s larger-than-life version of Los Angeles, and the surrounding countryside.
But it’s arguably GTA 5’s slavish, beyond-obsessive attention to the tiniest details that truly sets the game apart from other AAA blockbusters. These millions of bits of minutia add up to create a game world unlike any other.
Below are the 100 mind-blowing “tiny things” in GTA V that caught our eye and make San Andreas such an incredible, believable space. Easter eggs and amusing character-switching moments have intentionally been excluded - this is strictly a list of 100 examples of Rockstar's peerless attention to detail, not a list of best moments.
We didn’t discover these details on our own - huge thanks to the great communities at NeoGAF, Reddit and GameFAQS for initially discovering and reporting on most these finds. By all means share your favorite tiny details in the comments! There are undoubtedly hundreds more.
1) Failing and repeating a mission will give you several slightly different versions of the same pre-mission briefing dialogue.
2) Flip-flops actually flop when worn - they aren’t glued to the bottom of your foot.
3) When wading in water, your clothes get wet - but only up to the point you actually waded. The rest of you stays dry.
4) If you hail and hop into a taxi at the airport when someone was already waiting for one, they’ll get mad and shout at you, or try to pick a fight.
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Backfiring cars can ignite gas trails.
5) There is a chance you can walk into a business while another random NPC is robbing it.
6) Michael will confess to and discuss random events that just happened when visiting his psychiatrist, like sleeping with prostitutes or running over pedestrians.
7) The little “tink tink tink” cooling off sound cars make when turned off is present.
8) If you talk to a character on the phone and call them again right afterwards, they comment on having just spoke to you.
9) Lamar ribs Franklin about his haircut at the end of an early mission. Later on, Lamar’s dialogue changes based on whether you changed your hair or not.
10) Backfiring cars can ignite gas trails.
11) Sometimes topless women will party at Vinewood mansions. Snap pictures of them with your phone and they’ll call you a creep and their boyfriends will pick fights with you.
12) If you stop your car in the road and block traffic, drivers behind you will flick you off.
13) If you try to force Trevor to listen to certain kinds of music, he’ll get angry and override you, changing the radio station back himself.
14) Sweat will seep through character’s clothes if they run or exercise for an extended period of time.
15) If you spend a lot of money customizing your car, random NPCs will stop and compliment you on it, and start snapping pictures.
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If you try to snap a picture of a street performer without tipping them, they get angry.
16) If you “accidentally” run over Michael’s wife, both characters react with unique dialogue, and she later sends you an angry bill for her hospital stay.
17) If you try to snap a picture of a street performer without tipping them, they get angry.
18) Sometimes street performers will get phone calls and will “break character” to answer and talk.
19) You can send other characters in your address book your hunting pictures, and they all text back with unique responses. Most of them angry or confused.
20) Hikers on top of Mt. Chiliad take pictures of the view with their phones.
21) Michael’s wife Amanda can be found on the game’s fake dating website, hushsmush.
21) The mouse clicker in the in-game internet isn’t a pointer finger - it’s a middle finger.
22) Dome lights turn on when you open car doors.
23) After buying clothes for the Lifeinvader mission, if you return to the store the clerk asks how the interview went.
24) After getting wasted and being discharged from the hospital, your character will still have cuts and bruises.
25) The Dilettante, the in-game Prius clone, initially runs silent until you aggressively accelerate, at which point the engine kicks in.
26) If you pull up to a red light in a sports car next to someone else in a sports car and rev your engine, they’ll often burn out and race you when the light turns green.
27) Burning rubber (or doing other attention-getting things) will lead to NPCs whipping out their phones to film you.
28) Kicking cars can dent them.
29) NPCs will cover their heads or run for awnings when it starts raining.
30) You lose your GPS signal when entering a tunnel.