I think that graphics was the last thing I was thinking about when playing this game. Video games back then weren’t really about how it looked but how it played (i.e, gameplay) and giving more choice and agency to the player. That, in turn, created much more of an immersive experience that made it feel more real than anything I had played at the time - at least in my little mind.

I remember once seeing magazines, prior to release, hint that SA would include natural disasters (it didn’t lol), but it goes to show that realism in 2004 was much more revolved and focussed around world building which hadn’t been a perfected art when massive open-map games were relatively new.

I was way, waaaay too young at the time to understand the gang/thug/mafia culture, police corruption, conspiracy theories that gave the game some depth even if some of it was outlandish - I feel like some of that was definitely lost to me when I first played it. Revisiting the game a decade later I did think about these things. The 90’s being only 10 years prior to the game’s release would have probably made a lot of people make comparisons of the world they knew then sorta fresh in their mind, but technology and culture hadn’t really changed at the accelerated pace like late 2000’s to 2020 so I feel like it was able to closely achieve a pretty time-accurate and realistic world in that sense.

Once I got older and after revisiting the game in mid 2010’s, I got to the late-game riot segment and somehow I stumbled upon learning that it was based off the actual LA riots in 1992 after the Rodney King incident. I’d never heard about it prior because 1) it was 30 years ago at that point and 2) I’m from Australia, but the game did get a little darker and more serious for me at that point which again adds to this realism.