Wangan: The Midnight Club
How A Rockstar Game Inspired a Racing Novel Series.
Disclaimer: Midnight Club is a street racing video game title owned by Rockstar Games.
I remember it like it was yesterday—my best friend, James, and I were sitting in the dark at his grandmother's house. The clock told us it was well past 2 a.m. However, we were captivated by a brand-new video game that had just come out that year called Midnight Club.
The premise of this game was you started off as a nameless taxi cab driver in New York. You would come across people in modified cars, and upon flashing your headlights at them, you would initiate a series of races against this character. Beating that person meant you won their car. This allowed you to progress up the ladder to the final champions (there were city champions and a world championship due to the fact you got to also race around London in the first game as a second city map).
The game was open-world—meaning you had freedom to roam the city map. Pedestrians lined the streets (you could hit them in the first two franchise installments before the violence factor was traded for real licensed cars later on), and civilian cars abide by basic traffic flows which provided obstacles for you to navigate around. We were locked in to this new world on a brand new system that had just released—the Playstation 2.
The franchise was inspired by a real life club of street racers in Japan that were dubbed The Midnight Club. They operated in the dark streets of Tokyo in the ‘90s but disbanded after accidents occurred. These were sometimes know as the Wangan sessions.
The franchise carried through four main iterations with the last being Midnight Club: Los Angeles—taking place solely in a major recreation of thr city of L.A. for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. That was sadly the last we would ever see of the series. Both this title and the previous Midnight Club III: Dub Edition featured actual licensed cars and part brands, as opposed to knock-off versions in the first two. The brands didn't want people splattered on their products, so pedestrians jump out of the way now.
Later in life, I was driving home from work and this game series popped into my head again after seeing someones modified ride at a traffic light. I think I was pretty disgruntled about something and so I wondered what the nameless driver's life was like.
I began to fantasize about it, actually…
The seed sprouted. On Green was born.
I am really fuzzy on certain details with the timeline of things as the writing didn't actually begin until after I fell into a massive depression after my wife's 17 year old brother was shot and killed in a violent attack by some other punk piece-of-shit criminal teenager, and then we lost her dad to cancer soon after that. All of this while we are just crawling out of the ashes of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I had to deal with all this pain otherwise I was probably going to kill myself from everything I witnessed over that time frame—plain and simple. I was the most depressed I had ever been in my life and I wanted to die.
That's when I opened Word and started to explore this pain. It became the engine, I just needed to write the parts. I worked like a machine—day in and day out, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, late nighters— piecing this story together. I wanted it to breathe absolute fire. I was furious with the world and everything happening around me.
We lost so much life that I had to create something new with a life of its own just to deal.
Framework from Midnight Club was borrowed to create a captivating, dark tale of an underground life. I decided to take form of that nameless driver and use a shell of a former self as the character. This former self is a name I would have been called if I wasn't adopted—Dustin.
Dustin Cameron was ready for the streets. Ready for his own pain and triumphs.
I wrote the books with help from a friend named Barbara on the editing. It was also an opportunity to stretch my graphic design skills on a project that was solely me and not for my day job.
That later gave way into a subsequent tie-in merch line.
Before I knew it, my fictional high-octane world was not only born, but operational. The journey even led me to be on a few interviews with local radio, and a podcast. Not only that, but because I did the online publishing thing twice already, I got to help format and plug in a children's book for Orlando's very own Russ Ray Rollins of 104.1 Monsters in the Morning radio show.
It was a dope time. I certainly hope maybe more is in store but it's a difficult world for an indie author these days, so I am grateful I got the neat experiences I did.
I am nothing without the inspirations from those early 2000s street racing culture games we had at our disposal. On Green is full of Easter Eggs from Midnight Club as well as some other car-action stories of the past, like Gone in 60 Seconds. It's published and available on Amazon in paperback and hardcover editions. If that sounds like a story that interests you, then check it out using the link from earlier in the post.
Great work. Now I have an urge to play Midnight Club!