My home PC is still on Windows 10 22H2, while my work machine is on Windows 11 23H2, and, to no surprise, neither machine reproduced the issue – Skimmer spawned on the water just fine, creating one via script and putting CJ in a driver’s seat worked too.

That said, I also asked a few people who upgraded to 24H2 to test this on their machines and they all hit this bug.

I have a likely explanation for why Rockstar made this specific mistake in the data to begin with – in Vice City, Skimmer was defined as a boat, and therefore did not have those values defined by design! When in San Andreas they changed Skimmer’s vehicle type to a plane, someone forgot to add those now-required extra parameters. Since this game seldom verifies the completeness of its data, this mistake simply slipped under the radar.

What made the game work fine despite of this issue for over twenty years, before a new update to Windows 11 suddenly challenged this status quo?