Rockstar giving away free downloads of Midnight Club 2 (but there’s a catch)

I spent a good chunk of the summer of 2003 playing Rockstar’s Midnight Club 2 on PS2. There were a lot of illegal street racing based games last-gen, but MC2 managed to remain ahead of the competition thanks to its unique, track-less style of open world racing, tight controls, and (at the time) very pretty graphics. The series has been strangely MIA ever since 2008’s Midnight Club: Los Angeles, but now Rockstar is giving fans an opportunity to relive their virtual ricer glory days by downloading Midnight Club 2 for free.

In order to get the game, you’ll need to join Rockstar’s Steam group using a Steam account that has at least one purchase recorded on it. You have to join the group by May 15th, and stay with the group until May 29th, when download codes will be sent out to everyone within the group.

Unfortunately, there’s a catch: Midnight Club 2 may or may not work on PC’s running Windows 7 or Vista (translation: basically most modern gaming rigs.) The Steam page explicitly states that the game will not run on modern operating systems, but some users have reported that the game works more or less perfectly on their systems — as with most old PC games, getting it to run on a modern PC seems to depend on your particular set-up. There are some fan-made patches for the game out there as well, but likewise, they seem to work for some people and not for others.

It’s also worth noting that joining Rockstar’s Steam group will probably cause your Community page’s update stream to be flooded with news about Max Payne 3 (which is probably why Rockstar is doing this promotion in the first place,) so anyone who’s overly sensitive about spam might want to hold off on signing up for the deal right away.

Then again, it’s hard to argue with a free game, and I’m guessing there’s a lot of Midnight Club 2 fans out there who are still willing to sign up for Rockstar’s shameless advertising ploy on the slight chance that they might be able to play MC2 for free. Again, there’s a good chance that the game might not work on your PC, but if you’re willing to chance it or still have an old PC or netbook that runs Windows XP, you can join the Steam group via this link.