(As in, it was a real feat of engineering to squeeze a game like that onto a system with just 32+4 megs of memory. I believe that they used a heavily-modified version of RenderWare as their game engine, so, the folks from Criterion Software deserve some recognition, too.)
Off-topic, but, there was a lot of really solid programming happening in those days, and I miss that era a lot. The first God of War game left an even bigger impression on me than San Andreas did. Tim Moss was the lead programmer on that one, and though it was a smaller game than San Andreas, the whole thing just vibrated with expert-level first-party programming. You could just tell that that project, internally, must have enjoyed a very productive marriage between creativity and serious engineering talent.