Minh Nguyen
Published on

Midnight Apex

Midnight Apex is a driving simulation that runs in the browser. It takes place in several cities and settings, and includes lo-fi music and an auto-drive mode.

Play Midnight Apex

Inspired by Initial D

Midnight Apex is inspired by Initial D, the street-racing manga and anime known for night runs down winding mountain passes. That mood shapes the cover art and the late-night roads.

Where you can drive

  • Nine destinations: San Francisco, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, New York, Rio, Dubai and Sydney.
  • 27 city, mountain and coast roads.
  • Four kinds of weather and three times of day.
  • Three cars.

Ways to play

  • Turn on auto-drive and just watch the road go by.
  • Listen to a lo-fi radio that is generated live as you drive.
  • Chase lap times on the leaderboard. There are no accounts, so treat it as friendly competition. Laps driven with auto-drive on are not submitted.

Meet the AE86

The hero car of the genre gets its own 3D showroom: a 1985 Toyota Sprinter Trueno GT-Apex (AE86) you can orbit, inspect part by part, and rev. Flip the pop-up headlights, roll it down a touge or a neon parking area, and jump between camera presets from the cockpit to a close-up of the wheels.

Open the AE86 showroom

How it's built

  • The whole game is one page, built with three.js and generated from a handful of small source files. No build tools are needed to play.
  • A few serverless functions run the leaderboard.