The last Midnight Club game came out 18 years ago, if you can believe it. At the time, there wasn’t any reason to expect it would be the last; the series was seemingly bouncing from strength to strength, each entry a more fully formed and polished product than the one that preceded it. The behemoth that is Rockstar was obviously already well established by 2008, but back then, the company still had multiple irons in the fire besides Grand Theft Auto. Red Dead was still a thing, after all. And yet, we never got that Midnight Club 5. Now, we may have some insight as to why.
Kris Roberts, a former Rockstar San Diego senior designer who worked on the Midnight Club series, recently pulled back the curtain in an interview over at Insider Gaming about what happened with the street racing franchise after Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Roberts said that the MC team did indeed begin work on a fifth entry that included a map set in London. “There was effort, and they were starting, and they were starting Midnight Club 5, or whatever they were going to call it, but it didn’t last, and it was canceled,” Roberts told the site.
The developer chalked this up to “non-trivial conflict” with the gaming giant’s global headquarters in New York, stemming from missed deadlines before Midnight Club: LA’s release. And indeed, MCLA was originally slated to launch in early 2008, but ended up sliding to late October of that year. Games have certainly been tardier, and it’s hard to imagine anyone outside Rockstar really caring because the final product was phenomenal, but as Roberts tells it, the MC team was already skating on thin ice because, surprise, surprise, they weren’t the breadwinner in the family.
“The perception was we never got the accolades or the reception,” Roberts said. “The New York perspective was, ‘You’re not GTA.’ When you’re the red-headed stepchild project—you know, we’re doing a good job, we’re world-class, but we’re still treated less than. It was challenging.”
Having observed how Rockstar has treated its franchises that aren’t Grand Theft Auto over the last 15 years, Roberts’ read of the situation isn’t terribly surprising. “The team in San Diego kind of…we felt, in any other studio environment, Midnight Club was a solid game,” he told Insider Gaming. And indeed—when you look at the mess that Need for Speed was in around the time of MCLA’s release, there’s little question that the San Diego crew were operating at a very high level. A level that should’ve been high enough to ensure the series’ continued existence, but the video game business, even back then, was shelving quality projects with respectable fanbases in exchange for cash cows.
Sometimes—like in Grand Theft Auto V’s case, obviously—that gambit pays off. A lot of the time it doesn’t, though, which is how we end up with all these closures and layoffs at big companies like EA and Microsoft. You could say some of Midnight Club’s legacy lives on in GTA Online, of course, but only in the greediest, most satirical sense, where an in-world equivalent of a Celica GT-Four costs a week of your life. It’s not exactly the same.
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