Former Rockstar designer says Midnight Club was shelved for GTA's success
Kris Roberts said Midnight Club 5 had already reached early development, with London among its captured locations, before Rockstar killed the series in 2010-11.
Former Rockstar senior designer Kris Roberts said Midnight Club was shelved because it could not match Grand Theft Auto’s scale and success. Roberts said Midnight Club 5 had already entered early development before Rockstar canceled it in 2010 and 2011, after prototype work that included research and captured locations, including London.
That detail sharpens the long-running question around Rockstar’s non-GTA projects. Roberts described Midnight Club inside the studio as a “red-headed stepchild,” even though he said the racing series had competed well against Need for Speed and Burnout. What ended it, in his telling, was not a lack of speed or identity, but leadership’s view that the franchise was simply “not GTA.”
The timeline makes the call easier to read in hindsight. Midnight Club began with Midnight Club: Street Racing in 2000, and its last released entry, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, arrived in 2008. Rockstar later kept listing Midnight Club: Los Angeles on its official game pages, but the series never returned as a full release, leaving that eight-year gap to hang over every new comment about the franchise.
Roberts’ account fits the broader picture of how Rockstar allocates its creative bandwidth. Multiple outlets have tied Midnight Club’s cancellation to a studio that was prioritizing the size, scope, and resources of Grand Theft Auto over smaller franchises. In practice, that meant Midnight Club 5 could get as far as early development and location capture, then still lose out when compared with the gravitational pull of GTA.
For GTA fans, the takeaway is less about nostalgia for street racing and more about the studio’s priorities after GTA 6. Midnight Club is the cleanest example of what happens when Rockstar’s biggest machine keeps absorbing the attention, money, and internal trust that once might have gone to a different series. Roberts’ comments show that even a franchise that held its own against Need for Speed and Burnout was still vulnerable once leadership decided it was “not GTA.”
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