There is something about racing in outdated or overly flashy muscle vehicles on the streets that gives gamers a certain rush. For everyone, it is like getting to fulfill all of your road trip desires. People would frequently visit Midnight Club to relive that feeling from their youth.
Before GTA and Red Dead Redemption were well-known gaming behemoths that often released new add-on material for their online modes to bring in ongoing revenue for Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar Titles created a number of games, including the acclaimed and beloved Midnight Club. One of the few games the studio released that year was the iconic game.
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Rise Of Midnight Club Franchise
MIDNIGHT CLUB: STREET RACING (2000)
Midnight Club: Street Racing was the first game developed by Angel Studios for Rockstar, and it was released in October 2000 for the nascent PlayStation 2. London and New York were two interesting gaming locations. In a yellow taxi, you started your buried racing career, and you advanced by winning races.
The majority of the cars, with the exception of a couple that were not located in Japan, mimicked the period Japanese customization atmosphere, with the exception of the taxi.
The format is simple to understand. To win the race, aim your headlights at a rival, catch up to them through checkpoints, and beat them at the finish line.
The character starts out in his Taxi, which is a slow and basic vehicle. It beats rival racers and earn speedier and costlier automobiles by competing in a number of events with diverse purposes. The aim is to overcome the global champ, Anika, a young Japanese woman whose dad is a prototype car manufacturer in Japan. The player is the only one who discovers her secret and becomes the World Champion of the Midnight Club, as well as wins her production car, after being the first to beat her in a competition. After the race, Anika leaves for Japan.
The only other platform on which it appeared was the Game Boy Advance, which was created by Rebellion Developments, which is currently known for its Sniper Elite titles. The very first Midnight Club game was crude by today’s standards – but the atmosphere was ground-breaking and paved the path for subsequent open-world racing games.
MIDNIGHT CLUB II (2003)
In the ensuing years, Angel Studios was going hard at work on not one, but two Smuggler’s Run titles for Rockstar, Midtown Madness 2 for Microsoft, and a spin-off Test Drive. So, a Midnight Club successor was a long time coming.
Rockstar San Diego, as it is now known, set out to substantially increase the series’ influence. This round, it was available on Xbox, PC, and PS2. Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo were among the three open-world regions.
Bikes were featured alongside vehicles, as well as in-air automobile handling, as if that wasn’t plenty. The project’s scale was much broader than the team’s previous Midnight Club and Midtown Madness projects.
While the visuals were sharper and the information was more plentiful, no one thought Midnight Club II had that much personality, once the thrill of the other racers’ monotonous characters and two-wheeled racing had faded off.
A race is made up of a succession of checkpoints, which are depicted by light rows. In certain competitions, the points must be completed in a specific order. A transparent, luminous path leads to the next stop in this situation. The checkpoints in other races can be completed in any sequence. The player can choose which path to take from one marker to the next. In the game’s free world environment, there are no manmade restrictions that restrict the player to stay on a set route.
To get to the next point, use any place that is navigable in the open cruise mode during races. The automobiles in Midnight Club II are all based on real-world vehicles, but they feature minor changes such as unique headlights or rear lights. Furthermore, the majority of them have visual changes such as spoilers and bodywork kits that are popular in the street driving and import sectors.
The problem was that while the successor was clearly a step ahead of the previous version, Need for Speed: Underground was published just a few months later and it snatched the street-racing throne, as well as gamers’ attention, from the Midnight Club follow-up.
MIDNIGHT CLUB 3: DUB EDITION (2005) AND DUB EDITION REMIX (2006)
With the third instalment, things truly picked up, as the game was flooded with authorized automobiles for the first time.
We were in the midst of a silky R&B era, with Usher producing the second most purchased songs in America just months before the launch of Midnight Club 3. Meanwhile, Pimp My Ride had recently premiered on MTV, and the title came from cooperation with DUB, an American automobile culture publication. Cadillac Escalades with much more bling than color, as seen on the game’s cover beside a customized Chrysler 300C, was the result. It’s a classy product of its era.
To its favor, the game chose a concept and integrated it into the overall experience. The search for places was done, and three US cities were added: Atlanta, San Diego, and Detroit. The advent of car customization, such as wheels and wings, was a big development. Even a boring Volkswagen Phaeton was made to appear fascinating. The “most comprehensive vehicle modification ever for a video game” was the big claim at the time. For the first instance, this also represented the advent of making money. For so many, this is the series’ pinnacle because of the extra depth.
This was before the era of expansion packs, and it was on the PS2 and early Xbox, as well as a PSP spinoff. The Remix edition, released a year after the original, adds a new UI, additional races, 24 new vehicles, and a revamped variant of the Tokyo location of Midnight Club II. This game has an online option in which gamers can compete against peers from all over the world. Players also can join one of the many groups offered, or they can form and administer their own.
MIDNIGHT CLUB: LOS ANGELES (2008), L.A. REMIX (2008), AND COMPLETE EDITION (2009)
The latest Midnight Club game, to time, tapped on the decade’s theme – Los Angeles. MC: LA, like its forerunners, is a historical piece. In other words, it’s a little out of date, but perfectly so. The music is blasting, huge rear wings are standard, and you had a QWERTY keypad on your in-game cell phone to interact with your opponents.
You also start your street racing career with a modest car, in most cases an MK1 Volkswagen Golf – which was an issue because progressing through the initial phases was sluggish.
Everyone’s all for the sense of accomplishment, which the early Gran Turismo games excel at. In the Midnight Club game, though, people felt like stepping into a faster car and that was much more mind-numbing than anaesthesia, which was thrilling. Even if you did get a faster car, it was still a Ford Focus or a standard Pontiac Firebird. The city graphics, on the other hand, had taken a significant stride in the right way. This was a faithful replica of Los Angeles at the time, maybe a little too yellow in tone. In a quasi-3D view, you can pan out from the game’s map, which seemed like a technology from 2030.
“With Midnight Club: Los Angeles, our goal is to improve on all possible levels while staying loyal to the rigorous gameplay experience the franchise is renowned for while making it available to casual players and automobile aficionados,” said Jay Panek, the series’ producer during that period.
The game features high-speed open-world driving with harsh level spikes and uninteresting cars. However, the 16-player networked gaming isn’t to be overlooked.
With L.A. Remix, this game was also released for the PSP, and a year after, the Complete Edition included all downloadable additions, including the ‘South Central Update And Content Package,’ which added a new region to the game environment.
Fall Of Midnight Club Franchise
Working with Angel Studios proved to be a wise decision for Rockstar, as the first Midnight Club was a hit and received positive reviews. It wasn’t flawless, and it did suffer from many of the rough patches that games experienced at the time, but Rockstar was satisfied enough with the game, as its combination of graphical fidelity, a dark tone and amusing gameplay confirmed to have more than enough to sell well and please driving enthusiasts.
Midnight Club 2 was published shortly after, and it did precisely what it had to do by expanding on practically every facet of the game. Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition expanded more and more on the key aspects, though perhaps not as much as 2 did from 1.
Nonetheless, the concept had grown in popularity to the point that it rivalled Need for Speed, and it had gained a sizable fan base, thanks to excellent versions available for the Xbox and PSP. Midnight Club Los Angeles was published shortly after the next iteration of consoles were introduced, much to the joy of both old and new fans. The latest Midnight Club, like the previous games, improved on all areas, received positive reviews, and even included some useful customizing possibilities.
Unlike many other series, Midnight Club’s demise is not entirely evident, and a definitive cause remains elusive. However, allegations about difficult working conditions at Rockstar San Diego, including 12-hour days and workweeks that regularly extend into the weekends, were at an all-time high immediately after the opening of the Midnight Club LA.
Many comments have been posted on various blogs and forums by people claiming to be unhappy customers, workers or ex-employees, citing a variety of standard of living difficulties in the workplace, diminishing perks, and the company’s wasteful expenditure in irrelevant areas. Irrespective of Rockstar’s core operations, they weren’t the first publisher to overlook a lucrative series for an extended period of time.
Production is difficult these days since each big update puts a lot of careers and money on the line, especially for hugely profitable companies like Rockstar, who now have a lot of strong investors. Regardless of how much people really want to have a new Midnight Club game, convincing a lot of empty suits in a conference to endorse an arcade racing title above another sequel to a brand that is a sleeper hit like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead still is difficult.
Will the Franchise See Another Game?
Since 2019, a Triple-A title has been in production for numerous platforms. It’s part of a major series, it’s cooperative, it’s appropriate for all ages… and it’s open-world driving activity. That is, without a doubt, Midnight Club 5. Or, at least one can dream.
Given the unfortunate news, it’s likely that the franchise will return, as images of a technologically advanced Midnight Club game featuring Xbox One controller instructions have surfaced on the web. These pictures first emerged on Reddit more than a year ago, and they seemed to be in the alpha production stage. If this is true, the game has been in production for more than a few years, and we may be nearer to a fresh Midnight Club than we may think.