Midnight Club 2 - On This Day

Over the past decade, the video game market has been large enough for several different arcade rides, including Need for Speed, Burnout, Test Drive, and Midnight Club. The latter was the hope of Rockstar Games, the publisher of the GTA series, which hired the former Angel Studios team in San Diego. He had previously worked on the game Midtown Madness, and some of the ideas from it were transferred to the Midnight Club series. The second, and most successful part of the series, was launched exactly 19 years ago.

Street races at Midnight Club 2 took place in three locations: Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo. For the first time in the series, in addition to cars, motorcycles could also be ridden. All vehicles had a system of damage, but it was purely visual and left no trace on the gameplay itself, ie handling. The vehicles were not licensed, but just like in GTA games, they mimicked real models. They could be upgraded with various spoilers and other accessories.

In addition to the single-player campaign, the game also had online multiplayer, which was a bit strange in today's terms. Namely, cheating codes could be used in this multiplayer, and players were free to change usernames at any time, thus avoiding any punishment for sabotaging races and the like.

Midnight Club 2 was first released for the PlayStation 2 console, and later for the Xbox and PC. It picked up good ratings and sold in the millions, enough for Rockstar to approve two more episodes. We last saw him in 2008, and his developer has since focused on making games from the Red Dead series. This was also the first and last game from the Midnight Club Series to appear on PC. It was also sold on Steam but was eventually withdrawn from sale after the music license expired.