Insider Gaming piece on why Midnight Club 5 got canceled, makes you think about what else Rockstar shelved for GTA 6

Saw this over on Insider Gaming and it got me thinking. They did a short piece on Midnight Club 5, the one that never happened. Series ran from 2000 to 2009, and apparently a fifth game was actually in development before Rockstar pulled the plug.

I remember playing Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition back in the day, the customization was wild for its time. Los Angeles was basically a playground. Then LA got a proper GTA treatment with V and the street racing scene moved into GTA Online. So in a way, Midnight Club's DNA is still around, just absorbed into the bigger franchise.

What I keep coming back to is the timing. If a fifth game was in the works around 2009-2010, that's right when Rockstar was ramping up GTA V and probably early RDR2 pre-production. They only have so many studios and so many people. Something had to give. The article doesn't go into deep detail but it's not hard to connect the dots, Rockstar bet everything on their heavy hitters and Midnight Club got left behind.

Now with GTA 6 being the most expensive game ever made, I wonder what else got shelved or merged into it. We already know Agent vanished. Bully 2 rumors have been around forever. Maybe some of those ideas ended up in Leonida. The car culture in Vice City could easily carry some Midnight Club spirit, especially with all the customization we're expecting.

What forgotten Rockstar project do you wish had survived long enough to see the light of day?

Source: Insider Gaming · Curated content.

I keep thinking about urban density. Los Santos had those tight Downtown grids perfect for Midnight Club style runs (especially around Strawberry). If Rockstar absorbed that DNA into GTA 6, I hope they've put similar claustrophobic street networks somewhere in northern Vice City or out west near Port Gellhorn. Flat swamp highways (looking at you, Grassrivers) don't make for great drag strips.

Yeah, those tight downtown grids are missing in a lot of open worlds. Here in brazil we have narrow coastal avenues in Rio that feels like pure Midnight Club territory. Hope northern Vice City got that same energy. Flat swamp is for boats, not drag strips.

ngl i never even touched midnight club but after reading this i'm kinda salty about it. tight downtown grids hit different when you're going 120 in a civic you modded yourself.

flat swamp is for boats, not drag strips

fr tho. i hope vice city proper has those narrow neon streets where you can barely fit two lanes.

also if they shelved bully 2 for this i need someone to answer for that. i just played the first one last semester on my roommate's old ps4 and now i want more.

customization in gta online is expensive as hell so if gta 6 let's me rice out a car without selling a kidney i'm down. midnight club spirit or not, just don't make me grind three weeks for a spoiler

Agent and Bully 2 died because Rockstar finally admitted single-player doesn't scale in microtransactions. No mystery there.

don't make me grind three weeks for a spoiler

You will. Midnight Club's DNA is sitting in GTA Online, priced at forty hours per neon spoiler. Same hustle, bigger map.