This was the game that made me realize mods existed. I still remember it. I was 5-6 years old, it was 2005, and I was looking up pictures of midtown madness 2 online, looking for a wallpaper. I saw a blue hatchback (i think it was a Ford Focus) and thought "hey, that car isnt in the game, is it some kind of secret?". I clicked on the picture and was brought to MM2C. I realized that i could download cars from the Internet and put them in my game. For a 6 year old that loved cars, this was absolutely mind-boggling and life changing. MM2C, MM2X, MM2Br, EricsMM2Site, MM2W, MMArchive... I was so hooked on mods for the Midtown Madness series of games, that i continued to regularly play it until I was in my mid teens. I will always have fond memories of Midtown Madness, and its modding scene. It was one of the first video games I ever played, and considering i regularly played it for something like 10 years of my life, it's certainly one of the most significant/important games in my life. Its sad that basically every site has since shut down besides MM2X, but at least those guys ae still going strong on Discord. Side note too, i managed to get ahold of the owner of EricsMM2Site, and apparently he saved all of the mods he'd previously hosted on his site. He gave me a Google Drive link to all of it, ill reply with the link here shortly. Theres lots of hard to find stuff in his collection.
Heres his mod repo as promised: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vHNXMK2ecN_zoE7eaCbBPScpsIEKFi5P?usp=sharing If you have to request access to it, just say you got the link from a fellow MM2 fan and you want to see the mods.
Hahahaha yes! I remember child me wondering how the beetle was going so fast! And not knowing the existence of the drive on water mod. Eventually I figured it out. What a blast from the past this whole video was. Gotta download it now and let the nostalgia hit.
There is something nice about this era of pre-shader graphics - especially for me, the feeling that I could program something not that much worse given enough time and effort!
Midtown Madness and Midtown Madness 2 wow! The endless amount of mods and maps you could play was AMAZING! I spent hours on these games and never got bored. I remember they were talking of Midtown Madness 3 but never came. Shame because this game was revolutionary for it's time. And then Motocross Madness and 4x4 evolution. I love talking about old games :P
I got MM3 with my Xbox, it wasn´t much fun :< But these mods for MM2 are somehow magical, the sharp textures with the simple shiny 3d models make them somehow very good looking :>
It is unfortunate that so many of the old mods seem to have been lost. Websites pertaining to Midtown have a lot of mixed results, however there are a few discord communities still thriving where you can ask if someone still has the mod you remember. Loved this video, thanks for keeping Midtown alive. I'll post the discord community links as a reply.
Thanks! Links will probably go to review as I get a ton of porn spam if I enable them, so if the comment fails to appear give me a day or two to get it approved.
Arg, yes - TH-cam are a pain with this, they're unable to filter out even the most obvious porn links but they can somehow trap things like Discord invites instantly without even giving me the chance to review them! Leave it with me, I'll try to sort something out.
@@itsPanoz sadly it's completely eaten them, despite claiming in the front end that links should go to review. Sigh. If you email them over to midtown123@timberwolf.club I'll get them added to the description, probably the safest way!
I'm glad someone is archiving these mods. I remember even in the late hayday, links were dying quickly. I remember the arch map! I also remember another, MM2 mod, which also had a bridge, but that was made as a sort of visual tech demo, it was very detailed, and quite small (iirc just one road, the bridge, "forest background" and a few houses)
Omg, I didn't tought I was going to be able to watch images of theses mod again in my lifetime. Thanks a lot, brings back a lot of memories! Especially that Paul_7 offroad map and also Archipelago altought it seems a bit updated from what I remember. Can't believe it was 20 years ago already.
Midtown Madness is so Classic and Nostalgic that it is still alive! I Totally Love this Game, as I grew up Playing it with the Disc, while as right now I'm not playing it with the Disc #keepmidtownmadnessalive
I must have had many thousand hours of playtime in the sequel to this. And a bunch in Midtown1 too. I literally had so much fun with all the mods, cars and maps. When I got out of bounds in this game as a kid, it scared me for some reason. It just felt so weird. Those stripped down cities, can't remember the name of them - but they were the most scariest to me. haha.. I still get a hint of that feeling today, too. I remember there were a Madness City 2 map for MM2, which had a "secret" city outside its main map. I spent so much time as a kid trying to find it but I had no luck. About a year ago I took the challenge of getting the game working again and downloading the map just to try to find the secret. And I actually managed, with a lot of trial and error!..haha Fantastic games! (You drive on a tight invisible slope on the water near the outskirts road out of the city, head straight and you'll meet a secret city in a while. It's hard to not hit the water so be careful)
I´m always talking about 1NSANE, but there was this one fellow called Quickie who preserved everything made for the game, mod vehicles, maps, even skins, and hosted them on his site already back in the early 2000s. Unfortunately everything was lost after he passed away and his site went down. There are still some places that host mods for that game, including some I made. I´ve never been much of a programmer or anything like that, but one day I figured how to circumvent the number of mods limit that was in 1NSANE as well, you just had to pack one text file that held the main information of the mod into a vehicle or map file, rest of it could be in a folder with the same name. This unlocked the limit from a couple dozen mods into practically unlimited.
I do love video games set in places that I've visited IRL, and I had the pleasure to visit Chicago a couple years ago. Maybe it's a little silly but it was a lot of fun recognising where I know the Five Guys I ate at before going home was as you went past it on the way to jump the river.
Plot twist: if you hadn't binned your old CDRs, you might have found them to be unreadable anyway. As it happened to me. My carefully curated files. Gone.
I've been pretty lucky with the few that remain, even the cheap ones. There's only one where the reflective layer started to go transparent. All backed up on other storage now, of course!
While not really "midtown", I've often felt that a good spiritual successor would be building a car game on top of the Euro Truck Simulator 2/American Truck Simulator maps and all of their related DLCs.
I feel like I’ve missed out heavily at not having known about Midtown Madness mods back in the day. Now I can’t even get the game to install on my computer, let alone install mods :(
I still sometimes drive around Chicago at low speed. I use the mod Revisited V3. I also like to park and watch the traffic with relaxation. But I was always spoiled by the noise from a flying plane. So I made my first ever micromod. I found firmware for unzipping/archiving files and made it so that now the plane flies quietly. I would like a very long story mode with an interesting solid story, automatic change of day and night, change seasons and weather. Probably on the basis of a standard game this cannot be achieved. (I wrote this in russian through a translator).
I was part of the mm1 mod community, was 15 back then...midtown hangout and Rambler forums...Razer_X was my name...I was one of the first ones to create import cars such as civics in zmodeler. I never finished my models because I was bad at texturing so I released all my scratch made models publicly. Some were used in the nfs community. Years ago I google my tag name and found out. Today no more...lost in history...those were the days. I remember Chadwick and his ram truck mod. Ramber crew and their semi mods, TEK_Xacto...😊
I sold my old compaq computer, classic ATI videocard included, and more importantly my old hard drive with all the midtown madness mods i had.. for 5 euros... Yep 5 euros for the whole lot. That's the last time i sold anything to anyone
Worst of those for me is selling one of the "audiophile" PlayStations with the RCA outputs and parallel port in a box full of games (and another PlayStation with a slightly dodgy CD drive) for £20, a couple of years before they were "discovered" and started going for silly money on eBay - at least, until the point someone got round to measuring one and realised it was just people finding 14-bit sound resolution with moderate distortion and compression more enjoyable to listen to than accurately reproduced CD sound.
I absolutely enjoyed this video- Midtown Madness is one of my favorite games of all time, purely for the aesthetic. I'm fascinated by late 90s games similar to this, and as such, I have a question. Is there any way to get Midtown Madness 2 running on a modern Windows 10 PC? I have searched all around on TH-cam, forums, etc, and its brought me back to square one. I bought the game, and I really wish to play it, but it seems hopeless, and I don't want the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time to be forgotten- and unable to be played on a modern PC. I understand that you most likely won't make a video on this- it will differ from most of your content, and I'm unsure of if its a waste of time or not. But if there is anyone that can help me, please let me know. I acknowledge that its difficult, but I don't have a very old PC or laptop to play Midtown Madness 2, and its a game I have always wanted to play.
I got it running for the video I did comparing the game's London to the real London... and promptly forgot what I did :/ I think it was something like: - Install from CD - Install the MM2 XP patch - Put a NoCD patch on top (the usual problem with games of this era is the Safedisc copy protection is not compatible with Windows 10) - Use dgVoodoo2 to emulate a graphics card MM2 understands MM2 Extreme has a bunch of fixes for things like the heap error and dashboards not displaying correctly on widescreen resolutions.
@@TimberwolfK Well, thank you very much for your help! With your help, I managed to get Midtown Madness 2 running- however, that presents one final issue. The game runs very slow- abysmally slow, at even the lowest graphics settings. I'm not sure how to fix this. Is there any way you know of?
Sadly not, especially if you've already got it running through dgVoodoo; I had this years ago on an old computer running the game directly through the graphics card, but this time it was fine for me both natively and through emulation (although with a lot of graphics glitches in the former case)
@@TimberwolfK Well, I appreciate your help! I was able to get MM2 running, and that's what is important. I hope there's some kind of fix or work-around in the future, it'd be awesome. I have an old Windows 7 "gaming" laptop somewhere, maybe it'll run better on that.
Surely CD's will last forever, I distinctly remember Judith Hann on Tomorrow's World smearing rubbing one with a Brillo pad and smearing it with honey before inserting it directly into a new fangled CD player. 😄
The prerecorded ones are pretty good (between music and games I've got a few hundred of them going back to the early '80s and not had any of them give up, although I've not spread any with jam at any point). Writable ones the dye can give up surprisingly early. Most of mine have lasted better than expected, but I've had a few become unreadable over the years.
@@TimberwolfK Actually, it may have been an episode of Not the Nine O'clock News, not Tomorrows World. Good tip about backing up your cd-r's though, sadly I was too late for my copies of Blobby 13 and Elite Utils 4.
Mods being lost to time is something I've become intimately familiar with in the last few months with Minecraft, go back far enough, and even the most popular game of all time is starting to have its early mods become lost, sure you can still find a ton of old mods, but those are for still popular old versions of the game, like Beta 1.7.3. But if you want to say find mods for 1.2.5, or Alpha. You'll start to find that mod archive sites with those version are dropping dead left and right, it doesn't help that at the time most mod creators used AdFly links for their downloads. Or hosting sites that no longer exist.
Absolutely. There's a sort of "golden era" for mod recovery, which is between the point Internet Archive started storing links to .ZIP and .RAR files, and the point where sites started going from plain HTML tables of links to clever CGI-driven things. Then you start introducing paywalls, login gates and ad redirectors and that's it, the site dies and it's gone. I do hope more of this stuff will start to resurface, like all those "lost" Doctor Who episodes which turned up in a box in someone's attic. It's weird being part of that early Internet generation, where half of your late teenage years are resolutely physical and present (the hundreds of CDs and books which litter this house) and the other half are completely ephemeral and gone.
Hey I see that you've found the Racing Madness Wiki in your results. I'm an admin for that wiki. It was merged with Midtown Madness 2 Wiki and closed so everything about Midtown Madness is on that wiki.
This was the game that made me realize mods existed. I still remember it. I was 5-6 years old, it was 2005, and I was looking up pictures of midtown madness 2 online, looking for a wallpaper. I saw a blue hatchback (i think it was a Ford Focus) and thought "hey, that car isnt in the game, is it some kind of secret?". I clicked on the picture and was brought to MM2C. I realized that i could download cars from the Internet and put them in my game. For a 6 year old that loved cars, this was absolutely mind-boggling and life changing. MM2C, MM2X, MM2Br, EricsMM2Site, MM2W, MMArchive... I was so hooked on mods for the Midtown Madness series of games, that i continued to regularly play it until I was in my mid teens.
I will always have fond memories of Midtown Madness, and its modding scene. It was one of the first video games I ever played, and considering i regularly played it for something like 10 years of my life, it's certainly one of the most significant/important games in my life.
Its sad that basically every site has since shut down besides MM2X, but at least those guys ae still going strong on Discord.
Side note too, i managed to get ahold of the owner of EricsMM2Site, and apparently he saved all of the mods he'd previously hosted on his site. He gave me a Google Drive link to all of it, ill reply with the link here shortly. Theres lots of hard to find stuff in his collection.
Heres his mod repo as promised:
drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vHNXMK2ecN_zoE7eaCbBPScpsIEKFi5P?usp=sharing
If you have to request access to it, just say you got the link from a fellow MM2 fan and you want to see the mods.
I also just realized that this video focuses only on the first game, whereas I tend to lump the two together as a singular experience.
I was part of MM2BR team and loved your comment. Thanks for remembering us.
Hahahaha yes! I remember child me wondering how the beetle was going so fast! And not knowing the existence of the drive on water mod. Eventually I figured it out. What a blast from the past this whole video was. Gotta download it now and let the nostalgia hit.
the low poly graphics are very relaxing
There is something nice about this era of pre-shader graphics - especially for me, the feeling that I could program something not that much worse given enough time and effort!
Midtown Madness and Midtown Madness 2 wow! The endless amount of mods and maps you could play was AMAZING! I spent hours on these games and never got bored. I remember they were talking of Midtown Madness 3 but never came. Shame because this game was revolutionary for it's time. And then Motocross Madness and 4x4 evolution. I love talking about old games :P
MM3 eventually came out as an Xbox exclusive. I had a bit of a play of it and... wasn't worth the wait.
@@TimberwolfK Xbox live was a good time with MM3 and cat and mouse. I also miss project gotham racing 2
I got MM3 with my Xbox, it wasn´t much fun :<
But these mods for MM2 are somehow magical, the sharp textures with the simple shiny 3d models make them somehow very good looking :>
@@TimberwolfK i'd say mm3 is fine but the physics aren't good compared to mm2 or 1, but the multiplayer is great
It is unfortunate that so many of the old mods seem to have been lost. Websites pertaining to Midtown have a lot of mixed results, however there are a few discord communities still thriving where you can ask if someone still has the mod you remember. Loved this video, thanks for keeping Midtown alive. I'll post the discord community links as a reply.
Thanks! Links will probably go to review as I get a ton of porn spam if I enable them, so if the comment fails to appear give me a day or two to get it approved.
@@TimberwolfK I left a similar comment last night but TH-cam deleted my comment haha. We would love to have you join our communities !
Arg, yes - TH-cam are a pain with this, they're unable to filter out even the most obvious porn links but they can somehow trap things like Discord invites instantly without even giving me the chance to review them! Leave it with me, I'll try to sort something out.
@@TimberwolfK hopefully my comment is in your spam section in creator still!😂
@@itsPanoz sadly it's completely eaten them, despite claiming in the front end that links should go to review. Sigh.
If you email them over to midtown123@timberwolf.club I'll get them added to the description, probably the safest way!
I'm glad someone is archiving these mods. I remember even in the late hayday, links were dying quickly. I remember the arch map! I also remember another, MM2 mod, which also had a bridge, but that was made as a sort of visual tech demo, it was very detailed, and quite small (iirc just one road, the bridge, "forest background" and a few houses)
Omg, I didn't tought I was going to be able to watch images of theses mod again in my lifetime. Thanks a lot, brings back a lot of memories! Especially that Paul_7 offroad map and also Archipelago altought it seems a bit updated from what I remember. Can't believe it was 20 years ago already.
Midtown Madness is so Classic and Nostalgic that it is still alive! I Totally Love this Game, as I grew up Playing it with the Disc, while as right now I'm not playing it with the Disc
#keepmidtownmadnessalive
I wish I had kept all my qwerty86 mods. His work has been a major inspiration in my hobbies as an adult.
Huh, did qwerty86 mods for other games as well or do I read too much into your comment? Which are those hobbies btw?
@@armorgeddon I think he made something for Carmageddon 2 as well, at least I remember the name from somewhere
I must have had many thousand hours of playtime in the sequel to this. And a bunch in Midtown1 too. I literally had so much fun with all the mods, cars and maps. When I got out of bounds in this game as a kid, it scared me for some reason. It just felt so weird. Those stripped down cities, can't remember the name of them - but they were the most scariest to me. haha.. I still get a hint of that feeling today, too.
I remember there were a Madness City 2 map for MM2, which had a "secret" city outside its main map. I spent so much time as a kid trying to find it but I had no luck. About a year ago I took the challenge of getting the game working again and downloading the map just to try to find the secret. And I actually managed, with a lot of trial and error!..haha
Fantastic games!
(You drive on a tight invisible slope on the water near the outskirts road out of the city, head straight and you'll meet a secret city in a while. It's hard to not hit the water so be careful)
I´m always talking about 1NSANE, but there was this one fellow called Quickie who preserved everything made for the game, mod vehicles, maps, even skins, and hosted them on his site already back in the early 2000s. Unfortunately everything was lost after he passed away and his site went down.
There are still some places that host mods for that game, including some I made.
I´ve never been much of a programmer or anything like that, but one day I figured how to circumvent the number of mods limit that was in 1NSANE as well, you just had to pack one text file that held the main information of the mod into a vehicle or map file, rest of it could be in a folder with the same name. This unlocked the limit from a couple dozen mods into practically unlimited.
I do love video games set in places that I've visited IRL, and I had the pleasure to visit Chicago a couple years ago.
Maybe it's a little silly but it was a lot of fun recognising where I know the Five Guys I ate at before going home was as you went past it on the way to jump the river.
I remember the downloaded fast and furious cars off the mod site, they had neon light effect for under the cars even
Love your vid mate :) This is a great trip for me, I was thinking about a Mitsubishi evo mod and here I am :)
Plot twist: if you hadn't binned your old CDRs, you might have found them to be unreadable anyway.
As it happened to me.
My carefully curated files. Gone.
I've been pretty lucky with the few that remain, even the cheap ones. There's only one where the reflective layer started to go transparent. All backed up on other storage now, of course!
I played midtown madness as a kid
AAAaaaa the good old days...wish we have a new entry with some new graphics just to drive around listening to some radio...
While not really "midtown", I've often felt that a good spiritual successor would be building a car game on top of the Euro Truck Simulator 2/American Truck Simulator maps and all of their related DLCs.
I feel like I’ve missed out heavily at not having known about Midtown Madness mods back in the day. Now I can’t even get the game to install on my computer, let alone install mods :(
I still sometimes drive around Chicago at low speed. I use the mod Revisited V3. I also like to park and watch the traffic with relaxation. But I was always spoiled by the noise from a flying plane. So I made my first ever micromod. I found firmware for unzipping/archiving files and made it so that now the plane flies quietly. I would like a very long story mode with an interesting solid story, automatic change of day and night, change seasons and weather. Probably on the basis of a standard game this cannot be achieved. (I wrote this in russian through a translator).
If you ever visit the real Chicago do you think you could do that for the IRL trains too? I don't think their wheelbases have been greased since 1999.
I was part of the mm1 mod community, was 15 back then...midtown hangout and Rambler forums...Razer_X was my name...I was one of the first ones to create import cars such as civics in zmodeler. I never finished my models because I was bad at texturing so I released all my scratch made models publicly. Some were used in the nfs community. Years ago I google my tag name and found out. Today no more...lost in history...those were the days. I remember Chadwick and his ram truck mod. Ramber crew and their semi mods, TEK_Xacto...😊
I bet these couple of addon mm1 cars i have burnt on my old CD-RW somewhere aren't the lost ones
Sooo, I just saw a guy wearing fake wolf ears rag a Volvo off a bridge...
I don't remember having any alcohol today. O.o
Oh my god I modding this! I played so much of this and MM2!
Does anyone remember an addon that let you drive around as the gold bar from cops and robbers?
I still play this game!
I sold my old compaq computer, classic ATI videocard included, and more importantly my old hard drive with all the midtown madness mods i had.. for 5 euros... Yep 5 euros for the whole lot. That's the last time i sold anything to anyone
Worst of those for me is selling one of the "audiophile" PlayStations with the RCA outputs and parallel port in a box full of games (and another PlayStation with a slightly dodgy CD drive) for £20, a couple of years before they were "discovered" and started going for silly money on eBay - at least, until the point someone got round to measuring one and realised it was just people finding 14-bit sound resolution with moderate distortion and compression more enjoyable to listen to than accurately reproduced CD sound.
I absolutely enjoyed this video- Midtown Madness is one of my favorite games of all time, purely for the aesthetic. I'm fascinated by late 90s games similar to this, and as such, I have a question.
Is there any way to get Midtown Madness 2 running on a modern Windows 10 PC? I have searched all around on TH-cam, forums, etc, and its brought me back to square one. I bought the game, and I really wish to play it, but it seems hopeless, and I don't want the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time to be forgotten- and unable to be played on a modern PC.
I understand that you most likely won't make a video on this- it will differ from most of your content, and I'm unsure of if its a waste of time or not. But if there is anyone that can help me, please let me know.
I acknowledge that its difficult, but I don't have a very old PC or laptop to play Midtown Madness 2, and its a game I have always wanted to play.
I got it running for the video I did comparing the game's London to the real London... and promptly forgot what I did :/
I think it was something like:
- Install from CD
- Install the MM2 XP patch
- Put a NoCD patch on top (the usual problem with games of this era is the Safedisc copy protection is not compatible with Windows 10)
- Use dgVoodoo2 to emulate a graphics card MM2 understands
MM2 Extreme has a bunch of fixes for things like the heap error and dashboards not displaying correctly on widescreen resolutions.
@@TimberwolfK Well, thank you very much for your help! With your help, I managed to get Midtown Madness 2 running- however, that presents one final issue. The game runs very slow- abysmally slow, at even the lowest graphics settings. I'm not sure how to fix this. Is there any way you know of?
Sadly not, especially if you've already got it running through dgVoodoo; I had this years ago on an old computer running the game directly through the graphics card, but this time it was fine for me both natively and through emulation (although with a lot of graphics glitches in the former case)
@@TimberwolfK Well, I appreciate your help! I was able to get MM2 running, and that's what is important. I hope there's some kind of fix or work-around in the future, it'd be awesome. I have an old Windows 7 "gaming" laptop somewhere, maybe it'll run better on that.
Surely CD's will last forever, I distinctly remember Judith Hann on Tomorrow's World smearing rubbing one with a Brillo pad and smearing it with honey before inserting it directly into a new fangled CD player. 😄
The prerecorded ones are pretty good (between music and games I've got a few hundred of them going back to the early '80s and not had any of them give up, although I've not spread any with jam at any point). Writable ones the dye can give up surprisingly early. Most of mine have lasted better than expected, but I've had a few become unreadable over the years.
@@TimberwolfK Actually, it may have been an episode of Not the Nine O'clock News, not Tomorrows World. Good tip about backing up your cd-r's though, sadly I was too late for my copies of Blobby 13 and Elite Utils 4.
Mods being lost to time is something I've become intimately familiar with in the last few months with Minecraft, go back far enough, and even the most popular game of all time is starting to have its early mods become lost, sure you can still find a ton of old mods, but those are for still popular old versions of the game, like Beta 1.7.3. But if you want to say find mods for 1.2.5, or Alpha. You'll start to find that mod archive sites with those version are dropping dead left and right, it doesn't help that at the time most mod creators used AdFly links for their downloads. Or hosting sites that no longer exist.
Absolutely. There's a sort of "golden era" for mod recovery, which is between the point Internet Archive started storing links to .ZIP and .RAR files, and the point where sites started going from plain HTML tables of links to clever CGI-driven things. Then you start introducing paywalls, login gates and ad redirectors and that's it, the site dies and it's gone.
I do hope more of this stuff will start to resurface, like all those "lost" Doctor Who episodes which turned up in a box in someone's attic. It's weird being part of that early Internet generation, where half of your late teenage years are resolutely physical and present (the hundreds of CDs and books which litter this house) and the other half are completely ephemeral and gone.
Hey I see that you've found the Racing Madness Wiki in your results. I'm an admin for that wiki. It was merged with Midtown Madness 2 Wiki and closed so everything about Midtown Madness is on that wiki.