‘Damn, right in the childhood’: GTA San Andreas’ Obbe Vermeij went ahead and bluntly squashed myth haunting the game for 20 years

Speculation about hidden content in games is nothing new, and Rockstar Games‘ Grand Theft Auto franchise has been the subject of many myths and rumors of its own.

With a while left until GTA VI, there’s a lot to speculate about. From the Supercops and Sea Monsters to stories of a secret submarine, we have been searching for years for hidden wonders. But Obbe Vermeij, technical director at Rockstar North at the time the popular GTA San Andreas was created, has seen fit to dispel a particular rumor which has already caused a stir on X/Twitter.

Vermeij took to X, to celebrate twenty years of GTA San Andreas with a bit of trivia about the development process. GTA San Andreas, the fourth mainline GTA game to release, is now in its twentieth year. The game was a step up for the franchise in almost every way, featuring a massive map strewn with quests, jobs, and all sorts of cool content in three unique cities.

Aided by the vast size of the map, fans were utterly convinced that somewhere on the map was a hidden encounter with the mythical beast Bigfoot. To date, no fan has ever found the elusive primate, but the rumor’s never gone away. One fan, Nevergrind Online, took to X to ask Obbe Vermeij directly about Bigfoot.

Vermeij was quick to answer, crushing the hopes and dreams of many fans while vindicating others’ long-held beliefs.

But Obbe Vermeij wasn’t done there, as he went on to explain in an answer to another user, that what fans thought was a Bigfoot-related sound effect was actually just the groaning stomach of CJ, the game’s main character, as he grew hungry because players had spent so long looking for Bigfoot in the woods.

For many fans the news will be no news at all, as they’d been sure for years already that there couldn’t be anything quite as big as Bigfoot hidden in the wilds of San Andreas. After all, many players had spent hours and hours searching for the mythical monster and had never found it. But many of the rumor’s truest believers took to the social media platform to express their feelings towards this bit of news.

Some users were sad about the time they’d spent looking for Bigfoot:

Others simply refused to believe Vermeij:

But the saddest reaction came from one X user whose reaction sums it up best:

Every fan of a long-running franchise has felt this same sadness when longstanding childhood belief about a game or TV show is revealed to be false. Here’s looking at you, the supposedly hidden Mew under the truck in the original Pokémon games! So we feel you on this one, Meursault — right in the childhood indeed.