NASCAR The Game 2011 – confirmed

The American NASCAR series has signed an exclusive multi-year and game deal with developers Eutechnyx, beginning with ‘NASCAR The Game 2011’ at the start of next year.

It’ll be the first NASCAR sim for two years, and will be created for the XBox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. It follows the move of Ed Martin to Eutechnyx from Electronic Arts – and his last move at EA was to secure an exclusive deal with NASCAR which ran from 2003 to 2009. EA famously closed the Nascar 2009 servers in February 2010.

There’s already an official holding page and forum up, with the nascarthegame.com site currently featuring a countdown clock. The ESPN site already has an interview up with Ed Martin, including details of 16-player online racing, and an intention to build an online community.

Single player includes the usual Sprint Cup career mode, a paint kit to custom your car, and money-making elements including helping out your sponsors and drafting your opponents. At the risk of over-exciting ORD’s own Tom Bowker, there’s also going to be two-player splitscreen racing.

It also includes 22 tracks, and the AI of the drivers is claimed to be modelled on that of their real life character.

“While NASCAR has enjoyed a rich history in video games, we really wanted to take the next generation of NASCAR games to a new level,” said Blake Davidson, Managing Director of Licensed Products at NASCAR.  “By partnering directly with Eutechnyx, the leading driving game developer in the business, to create NASCAR The Game 2011, we are convinced NASCAR fans and gamers alike will be blown away by the result.  With Activision as the publishing partner, we have the perfect combination to set the bar for all future NASCAR titles.”

If you’re thinking this is a U.S. only game, remember EuTechnyx are actually headquartered in the UK (Although they have U.S offices), and besides being immensely popular in the States, races are apparently broadcast in 150 countries and in 20 languages.

The world premiere of the first official NASCAR The Game 2011 trailer will be on Sunday October 3rd during the NASCAR raceday on SPEED, and the game itself is set for a February 2011 launch.