In honor of the upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive I shall deliver all the news this weekend twice: First the sane way, and then the fear way. It’s the weekend, I get to do stuff like this (I hope… please don’t fire me).
Sane: Before this news popped up I would have been hard pressed to name something more boring than watching cars drive around in a circle, but now that I’ve been reminded that there are NASCAR games, I think simulating driving a car around in a circle might win out. Still, that is my personal bias, and NASCAR is a major (sigh) sport in the U.S., so it should be considered a bit of a blow to EA that after a decade with the property NASCAR now has Activision as its game publisher.
NASCAR 11 will be the first Activision published NASCAR game and will be developed by Eutechnyx (Test Drive Le Mans, Big Mutha Truckers and SuperCar Challenge).Rumors have the game landing two weeks before the Daytona 500, which is Feb. 20.
This past September Peter Moore, head of EA Sports, also made it clear that EA probably wasn’t going to be getting the franchise back when he admitted that they had moved much of the NASCAR team to their MMA team and said there were no more plans to have EA publish a NASCAR game.
Fear: Activision.
