so it actually drives and reacts like him. We just had the guys from NASCAR out at our studio in the UK, and it was really cool to have them in the midst of development working with the guys on the Victory Lane animation and working with the guy doing the fly-over sequence and working with the guy who is tweaking and tuning the A.I.
#Nascar rumble sequel license#
The industry has obviously changed quite a bit since then, but giving the license to a developer really puts us in a unique situation. "The very first time the license went out, it was a developer doing it. "If you go back in time, in 1994, Papyrus released 'NASCAR Racing,' the original NASCAR game Papyrus was a developer," explains Ed Martin, Eutechnyx's executive vice president, North America, as I get him on the phone to talk about his upcoming game. This is a key distinction, enabling NASCAR to be more hands-on with the game's development thanks to partnering with a company that specializes in creating racing games, rather than signing blindly with Activision for the sole sake of dollar signs and letting the publisher decide who develops the franchise. Activision is involved, but it is acting as the distributor for Eutechnyx's game, "NASCAR The Game 2011." In reality, NASCAR has signed an exclusive new multiyear, multigame deal, but it chose video game developer Eutechnyx - creator of "Big Mutha Truckers" and "Ferrari Challenge" - to sign the deal with, not a publisher such as EA or Activision. But as it turns out, the rumors were only half true. From what everyone was saying, the deal was already signed and NASCAR and Activision were ready to drop the big news any day. Then, just last week, the rumor mill heated up once again about a possible deal between NASCAR and Activision. Would we ever see another sim, or would NASCAR's presence in video games be relegated to a side attraction in titles such as "Gran Turismo" and "Days of Thunder"?
And since EA Sports and NASCAR parted ways, rumors of NASCAR's future in gaming have consisted of everything from the NASCAR gaming license dying out completely to NASCAR signing on with a publisher such as Activision to try to one-up the deal it had with EA. It has been two years since the last NASCAR sim on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. EutechnyxThe first shot of Carl Edwards' virtual ride in "NASCAR 2011 The Game."