Rockstar has not released a new Midnight Club game since Midnight Club: Los Angeles in 2008. Fans have spent years asking whether the street-racing series could return. A former Rockstar designer now says a fifth game did enter early development, but it was stopped before the team could turn its first ideas into a full production.
Kris Roberts, a former senior designer at Rockstar San Diego, told Insider Gaming that the studio had begun testing cities for Midnight Club 5. London was among the locations used for early work. Roberts did not describe a nearly finished game. His account points to prototypes, planning, and internal discussions that ended before Rockstar announced anything to players.
A Fifth Midnight Club Had Already Started
Roberts said the new game was being discussed while Rockstar San Diego was dealing with the final stages of Midnight Club: Los Angeles. According to him, the team wanted to continue the series and had started exploring what another open-city racing game could look like. The London prototype is the clearest example he shared, although it does not mean London had been chosen as the final setting.
The project reportedly ran into problems inside Rockstar. Roberts described disagreements between the San Diego studio and Rockstar's leadership in New York, including arguments about creative control and the direction of the series. He also said missed deadlines on Midnight Club: Los Angeles hurt confidence in the team. Rockstar and Take-Two have not confirmed his version of events.
Midnight Club was important because it gave Rockstar a racing series that felt different from Grand Theft Auto. Players could move freely through cities, customize vehicles, challenge rivals, and race through traffic without being locked to traditional circuits. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is still sold through the Xbox store, but backward compatibility is not the same as a new entry.
The series also arrived before open-world racing became crowded. Need for Speed had street racing and police chases, while Burnout focused on speed and crashes. Midnight Club let players learn a real city's road layout and choose their own route to the finish. That freedom gave it an audience that still asks for a return almost two decades later.
