To promote its online video game store, Rockstar Games has decided to give away to all subscribers a copy of GTA San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one of the pillars of the history of video games: released in 2004, in a few years it sold over 27 million copies and changed forever the face, and the fate, of the already successful GTA saga.
Now it returns, for PC, and you can download it for free. The developer Rockstar Games, in fact, has decided to give it as a gift to all PC users who download the Rockstar Games Launcher, the official application to access the online store of the software house. This gift will not be forever: sooner or later Rockstar will decide to stop the promotion, although it has not yet announced when. With this move the software house pays homage, 15 years after its release, to one of its most successful titles and, at the same time, offers a good reason for users to download the launcher just presented to the public.
How to download GTA San Andreas for free
To download GTA San Andreas at no cost we must visit the new page dedicated to Rockstar Games Launcher. Here we'll find the button to download the launcher for free and below a very clear wording: "Download it now and, for a limited time, get a FREE copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for PC". Once we have downloaded and installed the launcher, we must then launch it and access our profile on the Rockstar website (or create one, if we haven't done so yet). At this point we'll be able to download GTA San Andreas for free, and it will automatically be added to our collection of Rockstar games.
A video game that made history
Rockstar Games couldn't have chosen a more iconic title to launch its launcher and entice users to download it. GTA San Andreas is truly a game that made history, changing the adolescence of those born in the 80s. But it was also a game that, because of its enormous success, has catalyzed a lot of criticism: to win, in fact, the player had to commit an infinite number of crimes, beat up even harmless secondary characters and have sex with as many women as possible, often prostitutes.
But, above all, GTA San Andreas was accused of pornography: less than a year after the release of the game, in 2005, began to circulate a patch called "Hot Coffee" that unlocked pornographic content. It was never clear whether the patch was limited to unlock these contents (which were already present in the game) or added them (and therefore the original game was "clean"). The fact is that Rockstar was forced to release an official patch to prevent the display of porn content and Take Two Interactive (company that distributed the game) was also involved in a class action launched in the U.S. by hundreds of parents of children who had purchased the game.