However, rumors of rough working conditions that include 12 hour days and workweeks that often spill into the weekend at Rockstar San Diego were at an all-time high soon after the launch of the Midnight Club LA. Unlike when a lot of other franchises die off, the death of Midnight Club is not very clear cut and a definite cause is elusive.
By why not? Why would a series that had been recieved so well and improved so steadily with each entry just suddenly evaporate? What the hell happened to Midnight Club? Ten years later, and we still don’t have as much as a peep from Rockstar about a new Midnight Club. Despite some complaints about some changes to the controls, racing fans still enjoyed this entry to the series and eagerly awaited the next. As with the previous games, the new Midnight Club improved on all elements, reviewed well, and even added in some good customization options.Ī lot of the goofy-nature of the original games was nowhere to be seen however, and some might say that loss of identity dragged it down a tad, but it was impossible to ignore what a polished, fun, open-world racing game Midnight Club LA was. The series simmered for just a little while, and soon after the next generation of consoles were launched, Midnight Club Los Angeles was released to the delight of many old and new fans alike. Nevertheless the series had reached Need For Speed levels of notoriety by now, and had amassed a rather large fan-base due to the series now having great versions available on the Xbox and PlayStation Portable. Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition improved even more on the same elements, although, maybe was slightly less of a jump than 2 was from 1. Also, the arrow at the top of the screen was a little less useless. The characters were more numerous and more fleshed out, the world was bigger, the graphics were a little better, and the diving felt much tighter as the handbrake didn’t need to be used as often and usually just served as a way to initiate drifts with small taps, which was a noticeable improvement over the way it was handled in the original. Unsurprisingly, a follow-up was released soon after, and Midnight Club 2 did exactly what it needed to do buy improving on nearly every aspect of the game. It wasn’t perfect, and suffered from a lot of the growing pains that games were going through at the beginning of this era, but overall Rockstar was pleased enough with the game, as its mix of realistic graphics, somewhat dark tone and arcade-y, almost Crazy Taxi-style of gameplay proved to be more than enough to sell well and please racing fans. Rockstar was looking for a different type of game to put out alongside their Grand Theft Auto games, and it looked like Angel Studios was the perfect team to help them do that.įortunately, working with Angel turned out to be a great move for Rockstar, as the original Midnight Club was a success and reviewed generally quite well. Part of this revolution was a studio that had already been making arcade driving games, Angel Studios. But that was all changing around the time of the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Dreamcast launch. Racing games had been more commonly focused on realism and consequence up until this point, usually keeping the wild and crazy racing games in the arcades or brought to consoles a novelty.
The selection of arcade racing games was the best it would ever be, both in terms of quality and quantity of the titles. Franchises like Burnout, Need For Speed, Flatout, Xtreme Racer, and a flurry of others were either seeing their inception during this time, or were hitting their stride. The world of racing games was very different at the beginning of the new millennium.