- Primary Subject: Grand Theft Auto VI and the Midnight Club series (Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix)
- Key Update: Rockstar never formally ended Midnight Club, and GTA 6's brief street racing footage is the closest thing the series has to a successor.
- Status: Evergreen
- Last Verified: November 11, 2026
- Quick Answer: Rockstar never officially canceled Midnight Club, but a former developer says Midnight Club 5 was scrapped. The last release came in 2009.
Midnight Club 5 had a London map, or at least the start of one.
Kris Roberts, a designer at Rockstar San Diego from 2001 to 2010, told Kiwi Talkz in an interview published by Insider Gaming on August 3 that the team began prototype cities for a fifth game after he left, and that the project was canceled.
Once that happened, he said, "It was pretty clear that there would be no more Midnight Club."
Rockstar has never announced the end of the series. Take-Two still counted Midnight Club among its "iconic brands" when it announced the Zynga deal in January 2022, and nothing followed.
The last release was Midnight Club: Los Angeles Complete Edition in October 2009. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on November 19, and whether Rockstar planned it this way or not, it inherits the job Midnight Club left unfinished.
Midnight Club grew up in San Diego and lost the fight with GTA
Angel Studios shipped Midnight Club: Street Racing on PS2 in October 2000. The name came from the real Mid Night club that raced on Tokyo's Wangan expressway.
Take-Two bought the studio in November 2002 and renamed it Rockstar San Diego, and Midnight Club II followed in April 2003 on PS2, Xbox, and PC.
Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition arrived in April 2005 as the first game in the series with licensed cars and real customization, and its name came from a partnership with DUB magazine.
Its maps were San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit. The 2006 Remix added a Tokyo map on top. Midnight Club: Los Angeles followed in October 2008 with a single city the size of all three MC3 maps combined, and it scored 82 on Metacritic for PS3.
Rockstar San Diego, which had housed Rockstar's RAGE engine team since 2004, went on to lead Red Dead Redemption in 2010.
Roberts blames friction with Rockstar New York over missed deadlines and creative control in Los Angeles, and says New York's view of his team boiled down to "You're not GTA."
He is one former employee, however, and Rockstar hasn't commented.
GTA V kept its tuner scene indoors
What I miss most from Midnight Club is the night. Los Angeles was a city full of modified cars after dark, and you could pull up behind a rival and flash your headlights to start a race.
The first time I flashed my lights at someone on the freeway, the race that followed dragged me straight through downtown traffic. GTA V launched in 2013 without anything like that in its streets. Street races were activities you drove to.
Los Santos Tuners arrived on July 20, 2021, eight years later, and gave GTA Online the LS Car Meet in Cypress Flats: a weapon-free social space for up to 30 players with a $50,000 membership, a Test Track, and new street and pursuit races.
It's the closest GTA has come, and all of it happens indoors. You drive into one building to find car culture, and when you leave, Los Santos goes back to being a city where no other car on the road cares what you built.
Players have complained about catch-up and slipstream in its races since GTA Online's first months in late 2013.
GTA 6 gave street racing a few seconds in its Extended Look
The Extended Look that premiered on Netflix on August 27 spent more time on racing than I expected from Rockstar. Jalopnik picked out a circuit race with a full lap-and-position HUD.
Elsewhere, modified cars with underglow and exhaust flames ran a street race while the player fired off a nitrous boost. A seaside car meet shows up in the same trailer.
Rockstar's written material says less. The Ultimate Edition page names Rideout Customs in Vice City, promising "donk stylings," and One-Eyed Willie's in Lake Leonida for off-road builds.
Both shops are exclusive to that edition. According to creator previews, Rockstar rebuilt the driving physics to combine GTA IV's weight with GTA V's accessibility.
Nobody outside Rockstar knows yet whether that street race is a scripted mission or something Vice City runs on its own. GTA 6 also launches as a single-player game, and Bloomberg reports the online component won't arrive until 2027.
Fans already got Midnight Club 3 running in a browser tab
Midnight Club: Los Angeles disappeared from the Xbox and PlayStation stores in October 2018, with no explanation from Rockstar.
It returned without an announcement on Xbox in April 2021 at $14.99 and still plays through backward compatibility. PS3 online went dark in 2014 when GameSpy shut down. Everything else in the series needs a disc.
Leandro Dettmer's mc3-web, live at mcdub3.xyz, runs the Xbox version of Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix in Chrome. It statically recompiles the game's executable into C, compiles that to WebAssembly, and renders through WebGPU.
Dettmer built on Laure Ladastra's mcdub3-nx, which brought MC3 to Switch homebrew and PC, and borrowed networking code from th0mk's browser port of Need for Speed Underground 2.
That project listed nearly 3,000 players in free roam on November 4. Take-Two pulled the reverse-engineered GTA III and Vice City projects off GitHub in 2021 and sued their developers before dropping the case in 2023.
No Midnight Club fan project has drawn a takedown so far.
Vice City should take Midnight Club's nights along with its nitrous
That street race is the part of the trailer I keep going back to.
Underglow and a nitrous kick in a Miami stand-in are what Midnight Club 3 was made of, and Vice City suits it better than Los Santos ever did (or maybe I wish Los Santos did more, given MC: LA.)
I want those cars out on the road after dark whether a mission put them there or not, waiting at a red light for someone to challenge them.
A build from Rideout Customs should matter once it's back on the street, and that shop should be open to everyone who bought the game.
Rockstar had a studio that knew how to make a city feel alive at night, then let that series sit for 17 years.
If the street race in GTA 6 turns out to be a single mission, the people running Midnight Club 3 in a browser tab will keep doing Rockstar's work for it.
I'd love it if Vice City put racers on its streets every night, the way Los Angeles did in my fat PS3 all those years ago.
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