How a single videogame impacted my life and career choice

Hi there!

Welcome to my new blog. I am new to this stuff. If I was a kid, I'd probably be putting some marquee into this to make it cooler... Actually...

That's enough.

Today, I wanted to delve deeper into a videogame that had lots of impact in my life.

There are a few videogames, present or past (and probably in the future too), that need no introduction. The videogame that I will discuss in the following post left a HUGE impact in my life, which is still present to this day.

A bit of context

Ever since I was a kid I was heavily into videogames and tech. When I was 2 years old, my mom got me a "keyboard" (that's what she calls it, I'm not entirely sure what was it haha) and that is where everything started. Coming off from the 90s, my cousins and my family had some videogames as well: we had some PS1 and an NES as well (I played Duck Hunt a lot haha).

When I was 4, my mom decided to buy an Original Xbox. In true Latino fashion, we sent it to some guys in the city's centre to hack it to be able to play pirated games (not encouring this, just saying that was the trend at the time). It came with a few games that I was heavily into: Halo 2, Spider-Man 2, Def Jam: Fight for NY and obviously some Nintendo 64 emulated games such as Zelda Majora's Mask, Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64.

This OG Xbox stayed with me until I was like 12 years old. I had to sell it to be able to afford a new console (along with my PS2) so I was quite sad to see it go. But without it, I wouldn't be the same person I am today, because of a specific game.

What was that game?

For people that knew me in high school, they already know this answer: it's Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. What they don't know is how much of an impact this game had in my life and my professional career choice.

My introduction to GTA SA

I think it was around 2006 when my cousins got GTA San Andreas. I was immediately stunned, it was unlimited fun for me. I have a lot of vivid memories of playing 2-player coop in the Xbox with one of my cousins and going on a spree.

Another memory I have from playing this on Xbox was trying to get to San Fierro and survive as long as possible. At the time, I still didn't understand much about it, so I just did one or two missions and then go and do whatever in free roam.

I cheated SO much in the game, that when I actually started playing the game, getting into the Madd Dogg mission, it was impossible to pass hahahaha.

So, how did this impact your life?

One of the biggest impacts already happened when I started to play too much: I inadvertedly started to learn English. I started to imitate the voice lines from CJ or other characters in the game. My brain for some reason started to wire the spanish localization with the voice lines, so for some reason I was able to learn english (complimented with my school's english teacher haha).

But THIS was just only the beginning. What happened next may shock you (get it? YouTube ahh clickbait :p)

GTA SA on PC

My mom got a computer for the house when I was 6. It was a Core 2 Duo with like 1 GB of RAM with Windows XP. Of course I was immediately blasted away from being able to have a computer. We didn't have internet, so playing Pinball and using Paint was pretty much all I did everyday for a year or so until we got internet, and then talking with my cousins via Windows Messenger. Good memories!

Anyway, when I was 9, one of my cousins came with a huge revelation for me: GTA SA, the game that I already loved, for my computer. In true fashion, the list of cheats came with the CD on the back. I still have the CD and the list of cheats as well!

I was immediately blown away to be able to play with mouse and keyboard, and have the game to be in the same place where I could browse the internet and talk with my family via MSN.

My introduction to game modding

I was always a curious kid. My cousins installed Encarta and Word into the computer, so you bet I already took an interest on using these apps. When it came to GTA SA, you can bet I was always browsing the internet to check on the cheats and something.

One day, I was browsing YouTube, and found an INSANE YouTube video (for me at the time).

I was astounded with this video. It was something so cool I wanted to get it for my game. I read the description but I couldn't follow the full tutorial, so I watched another video then I installed it.

From this point, nothing would be the same because I got hooked on installing mods for GTA SA. You know classics like the Smoke'n'Drink cleo, the gravity gun, the portal gun and so much more. One of my most memorable mods I installed was a King Kong boss fight mod hahahahaha.

But there was something I found that changed my life, forever.

SA-MP and MTA SA

These two mods didn't come into my life that close to each other. I first learned about SA-MP around 2009 or 2010, not quite sure. Being able to play my already favorite game in multiplayer, not limited by the consoles was insane.

I met two of my best friends with both SA-MP and MTA, respectively. I first met one of them through SA-MP in 2010 in a drifting server generically called "Tokyo Drift" (he's from Venezuela, and I haven't been able to go visit him or something, or for him to come to Colombia). We even made a drift clan and competed with other people haha. It was fun.

Then I met one of them (who lives in a city in Colombia and I met in person finally in April 2026!) through MTA SA in 2011. Funny story: I actually met him by just saying "who plays Minecraft" in a random server and he replied hahaha. It probably was a drift server as well since he was also into drifting at the time.

Playing on random servers as well was fun for me. I will forever remember playing in CrazyBob's Cops and Robbers (which closed in 2025) and trying to rob the bank only for the cops to arrest me quickly. Not content with that, I started looking on how to create my very own custom server. For a 10 year old who barely understood English, it probably was quite a feat haha. Of course I didn't understand a single thing, but I was able to get it up and running, and I used some generic gamemode I found on SAMP Forums or something. I was so happy and was waiting if any players would join (obviously they didn't lmao, firewall blocks and no open ports, but I didn't know this at the time)

Even if I wasn't able to get people to join, my interest on creating my own server was already there. Opening the gamemode and seeing the Pawn code (which I did not understand at all) was my introduction to programming. This interest was not only in SA-MP but also in MTA or Minecraft as well. The Minecraft one was pretty successful haha (and I learned to port forward at 13... and then completely disable the Windows firewall instead of creating inbound rules lmao), and both of my friends joined there, and created a ton of memories by creating a lof of maps and city-inspired maps as well. Lots of fun.

Coming back to GTA SA, I then started to interact with CLEO mods, by creating my own CLEO mod. I was inspired by a modder named Xander0203 to create a small CLEO to make GTA SA myths. Real cool stuff!

For those who know me in real life, I have told a couple people about some of the CLEO mods I created which are in my YouTube channel and on Taringa. If you know, you know!

Taringa was a platform kind of like Reddit, but from Argentina and public for everyone in LATAM. It doesn't exist now, but it was AWESOME at the time. I was able to be New Full User (your posts got a lot of good ratings)

My introduction to programming

As I mentioned, my introduction came in the way of seeing the Pawn code and the Lua code as well. I didn't understand a single thing, and 10/11 year old me was extremely confused. It wasn't until I was 14 that I started creating my own gamemode in SA-MP. I still have the files related to that in a USB drive somewhere.

Obviously with time, I learned HTML, then I learned to script in Pawn, then in Lua. Then I learned C#, then PHP, then C and so on and so forth.

And, obviously, I had to go through the known ritual of... adding player skin options with 300 lines instead of using a for loop to allow all the skins. We live and learn.

#include <a_samp>

public OnGamemodeInit()
{
    print("Gamemode started!");

    // Instead of doing this
    for (new i = 0; i < 299 ; i++) {
        AddPlayerClass(i, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, WEAPON_SAWEDOFF, 36, WEAPON_UZI, 150, WEAPON_BRASSKNUCKLE, 1);
    }

    // The 14 genius of me did this for like 300 lines or so
    AddPlayerClass(0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, WEAPON_SAWEDOFF, 36, WEAPON_UZI, 150, WEAPON_BRASSKNUCKLE, 1);
    AddPlayerClass(1, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, WEAPON_SAWEDOFF, 36, WEAPON_UZI, 150, WEAPON_BRASSKNUCKLE, 1);
    AddPlayerClass(2, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, WEAPON_SAWEDOFF, 36, WEAPON_UZI, 150, WEAPON_BRASSKNUCKLE, 1);


    return 1;
}

Even the code I put here is prettier than what I did, I used the raw weapon IDs instead of the constants to know what they were 💀💀💀

Where I am today

Today I am a software engineer working in a company. I'll say that I'm doing pretty fine, not much more. These decisions probably shaped my entire career as I was able to problem solve since I was a kid thanks to this (and maybe being somewhat good at maths, but that is another topic) and my curiosity.

All from a single game. To me, that is something remarkable. I am so thankful by all of these moments in my life as they led me where I am today, and thankful to all the people I met and my two online best friends. Since I was a kid I knew I wanted to work with computers, and then I immediately knew I had to be come a software engineer when I took a look into the code and toyed with it to create my first gamemode in SA-MP.

Did you start with videogames as well? Reach out to me if you did!

Thanks for reading this personal story. It was fun working on writing this, going through memory lane, at the same time as developing this blog feature.