AlexSergey framed the project as a way to put the San Andreas experience into a format more players could access. He said he is a long-time fan of the GTA franchise who previously created models and wrote simple scripts for the series. Years later, he returned to San Andreas and started making mods again, but ran into persistent technical problems that pushed him toward a web-based approach.
Modding roots and the move to the web
Before OpenSA, AlexSergey said his evening hobby work on San Andreas scripts wrapped in Node.js was unstable. Debugging was difficult, anything could break at any moment, and he had no regression testing or broader test coverage.
Many years later, in 2023, I decided to install San Andreas again. I joined Discord* communities and was pleasantly surprised, GTA modding is alive and well. By that time, I already had about 15 years of professional development experience, although I mainly worked with web platforms. In the evenings, purely as a hobby, I started tinkering with GTA again: writing small scripts in a language I barely understood, wrapping them in Node.js, in short, having fun as best I could. But all of this was unstable. Debugging was difficult. Anything could break at any moment. No regression testing. No tests. In short, a complete mess. And one thought kept bothering me, if only all of this were on the web, on my native platform, I would be able to properly figure it out.
As AI development tools advanced, AlexSergey said he got the opportunity to build OpenSA. He recently shared a trailer for the browser version and said the project can run custom maps, including Carcer City and Alien City.
OpenSA features and AI-assisted development
According to AlexSergey, OpenSA is capable of running fan-made maps rather than limiting play to the base San Andreas world alone. Carcer City and Alien City are among the custom maps he highlighted as supported in this browser build.
AlexSergey said the project is 85% created with the help of Claude Code. He credited that AI tooling, combined with his web development background, for completing the browser port in roughly three weeks without a larger team behind the work.
