Follow-ups
Rockstar released two major follow-ups to San Andreas: Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories before retiring the GTA III continuity and relaunching with Grand Theft Auto IV. Both games include references to characters featured in San Andreas, with Liberty City Stories set about 6 years after the events of San Andreas (in that game, for example, radio reporter Richard Burns, featured in news bulletins in San Andreas, returns as a radio call-in guest). Both games feature far smaller sandbox playing areas than San Andreas, and also eliminate gameplay elements introduced in the earlier game, including the ability to swim (in Liberty City Stories, but reintroduced in Vice City Stories) and climb. Except for news bulletins, radio programming in the later games also does not change based upon player progress. While character customization elements such as wardrobe changes are retained, the designers of the later games eliminated the need for the game protagonists to eat and exercise.
Los Santos, one of the three central cities in San Andreas, will be the main location of the next game in the franchise, Grand Theft Auto V.
An unofficial content port of the game's map to the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, along with similar ports using assets from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto III, as well as the original Grand Theft Auto game, was created by several users from the GTAForums community, which replaced the Liberty City map in Grand Theft Auto IV with a version of the one found in San Andreas.
Read more about this topic: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas