Midnight Club: Los Angeles

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One day last week, a bunch of bearded Brooklyn hipsters stood around in T-shirts and tight-fitting jeans in the searing California desert heat waiting to ride around a track in a Saleen Mustang, a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder or an Audi R8. Clambering out of the yellow Lambo, one, wearing suede brown oxfords with no socks, pulled a racing helmet off his head to reveal a huge grin. ‘That was amazing,’ he said, slapping his friend’s back. ‘I want to go again.’

And he did. Only this time he wasn’t driving around a cloistered track in Rosamond. He was powering the 10-cylinder beast down Sunset Boulevard at over 100 miles per. He was grinning again, though perhaps not quite as widely. After all, this time around he was only playing a video game.

Apparently, the surest way to a gamer’s heart is through the seat of his pants.

Rockstar Games, the video game purveyor best known for the Grand Theft Auto series, threw this high-adrenaline marketing party to promote the fourth installment in its popular racing series: Midnight Club: Los Angeles. The game allows players to race a variety of cars through a virtual -- but awfully realistic -- Los Angeles, with little regard for traffic laws. To prepare for its October release, they flew in video game journalists from as far away as Italy, had them sign a few waivers, and then put them in a range of exotic cars that were rented, borrowed or otherwise dragged to the track.

‘Most of the video game press have never been in cars like these. They’ve never felt the power,’ said Jeronimo Barrera, vice president of development at Rockstar. His theory is that giving these rather pallid, intense-looking journalists the chance to hear the roar of a supercharged, 620-horsepower Saleen Dark Horse Mustang will expand their enthusiasm for the game. Hence, good press. Which is important if the company hopes to top the 7.5 million copies sold for the previous installment of the Midnight Club games.

And that, in turn, is important to Saleen, which hopes the presence of several of its vehicles in the game -- including the much-vaunted picture on the retail box -- will actually lead to sales. ‘Gamers turn out to be our best customers,’ said Mark Patrzik, head of sales for the Troy, Mich., company. ‘We definitely have had people walk into showrooms just because they saw our cars in a video game.’

OK, so it’s hardly news that video games are really big business. But the amount of mutual back-scratching in this game mightily impressed Up to Speed. Beyond a co-marketing deal with Saleen, Rockstar hammered out similar arrangements with Nike‘s Jordan brand, 7-Eleven stores and Pizza Hut, which is plastering Midnight Club info all over 11 million pizza boxes. All told, according to Barrera, the game has some 2,000 product placements, from Chanel to iPod.

Then there are the cars: According to a Rockstar spokeswoman, in most cases Rockstar pays a licensing fee for their appearances in the game. And though BMW, Porsche, Honda, Toyota and a few others aren’t in the game, players get everything from a 1983 Volkswagen Golf GTI to a Ford GT. They also get a huge range of after-market parts from real companies.

And for the few attendees who weren’t counting the number of polygons on screen at any time, being able to customize a completely virtual car to the gills was apparently quite a thrill.

‘I’m a hard-core gamer,’ said Jo Garcia, the roving video game reporter for Playboy.com who also happens to be the company’s Cyber Girl of 2008. She rode in the Saleen and then played it on one of the flat-screen TVs set up nearby. ‘The beauty of this is it’s like ‘Fast and the Furious’ meets a video game.’

Meets the desert. With the mercury flirting with 100, drivers of the real-world cars complained that tires were getting dangerously slippery. They compensated with lots of braking, and the smell of burning brake pads filled the air. It was time for dinner. With burgers, hot dogs and chicken on the grills, the video game press clustered around tables, sipping on beers and chatting excitedly about Midnight Club.

Bruce Dugan -- who works in public relations for Rockstar, has a hearty beard and is in the process of moving to Brooklyn -- ran through some of the cars available in the game. Something was wrong: For a game as obsessively detailed as this, with every billboard on Melrose re-created and even the Los Angeles Times building rendered with reasonable accuracy, there seemed to be a surprising lack of Priuses.

‘No hybrids,’ Dugan said. ‘Nobody wants to race a hybrid.’

--Ken Bensinger

Scene from Midnight Club: Los Angeles courtesy of Rockstar Games