Rockstar Games reportedly began development on Midnight Club 5 following Midnight Club: Los Angeles, with London among the locations being explored before the project was ultimately cancelled.
The revelation comes from former Rockstar San Diego senior designer Kris Roberts, who worked on the Midnight Club series before leaving the studio in 2010. Speaking with Kiwi Talkz in an interview published by Insider Gaming, Roberts revealed that the core Midnight Club team continued working on the franchise after his departure.
According to Roberts, early development had already started on what would have become the fifth mainline Midnight Club game. The team had reportedly begun experimenting with prototype cities, with London being one location he remembers receiving map development work.
However, the project didn’t survive for long.
Roberts claims there was significant internal conflict between Rockstar’s New York leadership and the Midnight Club team at Rockstar San Diego. Part of that tension reportedly came from missed deadlines during the development of Midnight Club: Los Angeles, but Roberts believes creative control and the enormous success of Grand Theft Auto also played a role.
Despite Midnight Club establishing itself as one of the biggest arcade racing franchises of its era, Roberts said the series struggled to receive the same recognition internally as GTA.
“The New York perspective was, ‘You’re not GTA’,” Roberts explained while discussing how the Midnight Club team was viewed within the company.
Roberts said the developers believed they were producing world-class racing games, but Midnight Club was still treated as a secondary project compared to Rockstar’s flagship franchise.
Once Midnight Club 5 was cancelled, the team behind the racing series was eventually broken apart. Some developers were reassigned to work on Rockstar’s RAGE engine and Red Dead Redemption, while others were reportedly laid off.
The cancellation effectively marked the end of Midnight Club as an active Rockstar franchise.
Midnight Club: Los Angeles remains the most recent mainline entry in the series, having originally launched for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2008. Despite continued demand from fans for a revival or remaster, Rockstar has never officially announced another Midnight Club game.
The revelation that Midnight Club 5 reached early development makes the franchise’s disappearance even more significant, particularly with London apparently being explored as a potential location.
Whether Rockstar will ever return to Midnight Club remains unknown, but according to one of the developers who worked on the series, a fifth game was once much closer to reality than fans previously knew.