In the career mode, the player must place in the top three to unlock another race, with unlimited tries allowed to make the podium finish.

The challenges include a series of targets that the player's bike must land on after every jump, a timed freestyle measured by the number of points scored in the time frame, a race against a vehicle that is not a dirt bike, and a contest in which the player must hit ten targets after jumps before the other seven racers.

[1] As Rainbow Studios was completing the first two installments of the ATV Offroad Fury series, which released to critical acclaim, THQ took notice of the games' high quality and wanted its next MX game to run on their engine,[2] one factor that resulted in its decision to acquire that developer.

Following this acquisition,[3] Rainbow Studios relinquished control of the ATV Offroad Fury series to Climax Studios and drew upon prior experience in developing high-quality motocross racing games after the success of Microsoft's PC-exclusive Motocross Madness duology to make a MX game with the high level of quality THQ expected.

[17][18] By July 2006, the PlayStation 2 version of MX Unleashed had sold 740,000 copies and earned $22 million in the United States.