Could Midnight Club Make a Comeback on PS5 and Xbox Series X?

Could Midnight Club be making a comeback on PS5 and Xbox Series X? Rockstar Games increasingly looks like a two-series studio, and those two series are Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, which leaves a slew of great IP dormant. If any of this IP were to be resuscitated, it’d like be Bully, Max Payne, or L.A. Noire, all of which fall right into that tier below GTA and Red Dead, but ahead of some of Rockstar’s other less desirable IP. Included in the latter is Midnight Club, once a staple of the Rockstar Games portfolio that like most of its IP is currently rotting away. Yesterday, I would have given Midnight Club a zero percent chance of being revived, but after this morning, I can’t help but wonder if it may be making a comeback in the near future.

Today, Take-Two Interactive revealed that it’s in talks to acquire Codemasters, a UK developer known as one of the premier racing game developers and publishers. You may not recognize the name, but you’ll likely recognize some of its IP: F1, DIRT, Project Cars, and Grid. At the moment of publishing, the acquisition has not gone through, but it sounds like it’s more a matter of when, not if.

That said, what does Take-Two Interactive want with Codemasters? Well, that remains to be seen, but you’d assume — at least in some capacity — if acquired it will continue to operate as it has: making racing games.

Codemasters doesn’t own a ton of super valuable IP beyond the F1 games and DIRT. In other words, they aren’t very tethered to many IP, which leaves them room to experiment. And maybe this experimentation could include Midnight Club.

It’s a longshot, but it’s likely the only chance Midnight Club will have of returning. That said, who knows how willing Rockstar Games would be to let a sister studio take over the reins of the IP. It’s certainly not a franchise IP for Rockstar, so you’d assume it wouldn’t care, but this is only an assumption.

We haven’t seen Midnight Club in 11 years, and we likely won’t see it for at least another 11, however, unlike yesterday, there now seems to be a small glimmer of hope it will be able to race back from the dead.