If there’s an underlying theme to Rockstar’s Midnight Club series it’s one of grasping opportunities, and this trend started all the way back with the original title. Its one-of-a-kind driving engine had been created by developer Angel Studios for a cancelled N64 racer called Buggy Boogie, and it later repurposed this engine for a PC release called Midtown Madness. The firm then used that as a calling card to secure Rockstar as the publisher of its latest project – Midnight Club: Street Racing.
Midnight Club’s lead designer Darren Chisum had previously been a coder, but he switched disciplines after collaborating with Nintendo designer Shigeki Yamashiro on Buggy Boogie. Darren looked to Midtown Madness for inspiration for his debut design, and then greatly enhanced its core concepts. “We really liked the frantic feel of racing through a city packed with traffic,” Darren enthuses. “I designed the races in such a way that there were multiple potential paths to follow. We had searchlights for checkpoints, and instead of having those in a linear pattern I placed them in the middle of the city blocks. I also really pushed the building designs so that you could drive through some of them, up onto the roofs and then jump back down into the street.”
In anlook too much like real-life models. “We hired somebody who worked as a designer in the automotive industry,” Darren notes. “We then gave him props, like we wanted one car to be a cross between a Mustang and a Camaro. Then he would create these amazing hybrid designs. They were unique enough that we didn’t have to have to buy the rights to real-world cars, which would have cost a lot, and at the time you couldn’t damage or destroy licensed cars either.”
