Midtown Madness

Midtown Madness is an open-world racing game developed by Angel Studios and published by Microsoft, released for Windows on May 18, 1999. It was one of the first racing games to place players in a freely explorable city environment rather than a fixed track, using downtown Chicago as its setting. The game modeled Chicago at a simplified but recognizable scale, including major thoroughfares, elevated train sections, landmarks, and the river bridges, all populated with civilian traffic that obeyed traffic signals.

Players choose from nine vehicles ranging from a Volkswagen Beetle and Ford Mustang to a city bus and Ford F-350, each with distinct handling characteristics. Four game modes were included: Cruise (free roam), Timed Race (checkpoint racing against the clock), Checkpoint Race (live-city racing against opponents with open route choice), and Circuit Race (closed blocked-off course against opponents). The game supported both single-player and online multiplayer via the Internet Gaming Zone, including a Cops and Robbers mode in which teams competed to recover a gold bar and return it to their base.

Midtown Madness was notable for its physics and civilian AI systems, which were ambitious for the era. Civilian cars responded to collisions and traffic signals, pedestrians jumped clear of oncoming vehicles, and police units attempted to intercept rule-breaking players. The game drew frequent comparisons to Carmageddon for its free-driving tone, though it emphasized racing over destruction and carried an ESRB Everyone rating.

The game received generally positive reviews at launch and spawned two sequels: Midtown Madness 2 (1999, adding San Francisco and London) and Midtown Madness 3 (2003, Xbox exclusive, set in Washington D.C. and Paris). The original game was never officially re-released on any digital storefront and has no current legal distribution channel.