Every few years or so I find myself idly wondering whatever happened to Midnight Club, Rockstar’s arcade street racing series. I quite liked Midnight Club 2 back in the day, although I fell away from the series after that because, in fine Rockstar fashion, subsequent games weren’t released on PC. The series as a whole ground to a halt in 2008 with Midnight Club: Los Angeles—despite going over well with critics, the series was never heard from again.
In a new interview with Kiwi Talkz on Insider Gaming, former Rockstar designer Kris Roberts, who worked on multiple Midnight Club games and Red Dead Redemption before leaving in 2010, said there were a few factors involved in the decision to kill the series, including missed deadlines and “non-trivial conflict” between Rockstar New York and the San Diego studio where Midnight Club was developed, but the obvious elephant in the room was Grand Theft Auto.
“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.”
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Roberts said the San Diego studio was working on a new Midnight Club when he departed, but it was subsequently cancelled: “It was pretty clear that there would be no more Midnight Club and everything was going to be GTA and stuff moving forward, and that’s just the way it was going to be.”
Which sucks, because Midnight Club was pretty great (apart from the whole console-exclusivity thing), but also isn’t at all hard to believe. Midnight Club: LA arrived in 2008, the same year Grand Theft Auto 4 came out, and if there was any doubt prior to that about where Rockstar’s future lay, GTA 4 ended it.
The ending of Midnight Club also fits with the broader approach of Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive, which makes no bones about only being interested in major hits: When the company unloaded Private Division in 2024, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said, “Our job really is to focus on making the biggest and best hits in the marketplace. We’re not the long tail company. We are top-ten hit makers around here.” In an environment like that, being “good” often just isn’t going to be good enough.
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