Ah Shit, Here We Go Again

Origin

The line opens Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, released by Rockstar Games on October 24, 2004. Protagonist Carl “CJ” Johnson, voiced by Young Maylay, returns to Los Santos after five years away, is immediately shaken down, and finds himself dumped on a bicycle in hostile territory. His muttered response is the meme:

“Ah shit, here we go again. Worst place in the world, Rolling Heights Ballas country. I ain’t represented Grove Street in 5 years, but the Ballas won’t give a shit.”

The delivery is what carries it. CJ is not shocked or angry — he is tired. The line is the sound of someone recognising a situation they have already survived once and would rather not survive again.

What it means / how it’s used

It is the internet’s standard expression of weary recurrence: the moment an unwanted, entirely predictable situation begins for the hundredth time. Not disaster, not surprise — just the same thing, again.

Typical deployments:

• A recurring argument starting up in a comment section.
• A yearly ritual nobody enjoys, arriving on schedule.
• A software update breaking the same thing it broke last time.
• Any discourse cycle whose beats everyone can already recite.

The format spans media. It circulates as a still of CJ on the bike, as an audio clip, as a green-screen video edit, and as text alone — and all four work, because the sentiment is fully contained in the words.

How it spread

The clip lived on YouTube for years before becoming a format. A January 7, 2015 upload of the scene accumulated over 147,500 views across five years, and the line first appeared as a reaction image on the GTA Forums on September 23, 2015 — early adoption inside the game’s own community, which is typical for game-quote memes.

The breakout came in April 2019, when a Twitter user posted a green-screen edit of the scene designed to be dropped over other footage. It took 1,700+ retweets and 5,200+ likes within a week, and the green-screen version became the dominant form: creators could paste CJ’s reaction over whatever they were reacting to.

San Andreas has aged into one of the most meme-productive games ever made — a combination of enormous player numbers, a heavily quoted script, and a generation of users who played it as children and became meme-makers as adults. This line is its single most-used export.

Notable examples & variations

• Green-screen edits placing CJ over news footage, gameplay, or other memes.
• Still-image macros captioned with whatever cycle is repeating.
• Audio-only use in short-form video, where the line is instantly recognisable.
• Text-only replies, which remain extremely common.
• Edits that loop the line to emphasise how many times the situation has recurred.

Legacy / cultural impact

“Ah shit, here we go again” is one of the very few video-game lines to become general-purpose English. It is used constantly by people who have never played San Andreas, in contexts with no connection to games, and frequently without any awareness that it is a quote at all.

Its durability comes from precision. There was no compact existing phrase for the specific fatigue of a predictable problem restarting, and this one filled the gap exactly. Two decades after release, it remains among the most-quoted lines in gaming, and one of the internet’s most reliable reactions to a familiar mess starting over.