![]() ![]() For better or worse, online multiplayer is the order of the day and – honestly – it’s an area that I’d argue Midnight Club is a franchise with untapped potential in. Nor, tragically, is it likely to include any Burnout Paradise-style split screen multiplayer modes. ![]() Sadly, any modern Midnight Club revival is unlikely to adopt the same ethos. Its prioritising of traditional single-player over all else, a philosophy which feels distinctly old-school, and a little refreshing in today’s era of live service games. The fact that I was able to shelter myself from the crushing realities of online play without much effort is testament to arguably the most retro aspect of Midnight Club: Los Angeles, when compared to modern arcade racers like Forza Horizon 5 and Need For Speed Heat. ![]() I might not have been good at many other games back then, but in Midnight Club, I owned the streets, even if – in hindsight – this was only because they weren't populated by uber-skilled online players. In 2022, the game certainly provides an interesting mid-2000s time capsule, from its car roster populated by Fast and Furious film props, to its soundtrack loaded with Noughties artists and some wonderful bits of product placement like the T-Mobile Sidekick, the in-game phone, which looks more like a pager than a modern smartphone.įor me, all of this nostalgic furniture evokes fond memories of blazing through the game for the first time as a teenager, showcasing skills painstakingly honed in Need For Speed Underground 2. ![]() I certainly wasn’t alone either, as the name-dropping inspired a wave of fresh speculation about a revival for the street racing series, intensified by the discovery of a job listing at Take-Two owned studio Visual Concepts, seeking a producer to work on “an unannounced, open world driving game with a major license”.Ĭaught up in this hype, I decided to fire up my PS3 and powerslide back onto the sun-kissed streets of the series’ most recent entry – 2008’s Midnight Club: Los Angeles – with the goal of assessing whether there’s still a place for Midnight Club in a racing game landscape that’s changed a lot since the halcyon days of widespread financial ruin and Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’. That is, until January 2022, when Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick off-handedly mentioned the series during an investor call announcing the company’s acquisition of Zynga, where he included Midnight Club in a list of Take-Two’s biggest franchises.Īs a fan, I was surprised to learn that Zelnick was even aware he still had the keys to Midnight Club in his back pocket. ![]()
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