Inside NASCAR Kart Racing
Feb 09, 2009
My name is Ryan Stradling, and I am the Sr. Development Director at Electronic Arts – NC (EANC). We all are very excited about our new game NASCAR Kart Racing for the Wii that comes out February 10th, 2009.
There are multiple reasons why we are excited. First of all, the game is just plain fun. I play it with my kids, my friends, and whomever. We set out to make it a fun “party” game where up to four players can play at the same time. Also, whether it has been through formal or informal play testing I have yet to find somebody that cannot easily drive around the easier tracks. The Wii definitely helps this with its unique controllers. A cool moment for me personally was how interested my 5 year old son got into NASCAR after playing the game.
The art team focused on creating respectful caricatures of the NASCAR drivers, and we feel they come across really well. Finally, the core mechanic of sling-shotting around the track with your teammate provides a different flavor than any other racing game out there.
We set out with goals of making the game easy to learn and fast paced. In addition, we wanted to have a story mode so that you have an evolving story line option as well.
The game definitely stands on its own, but like anything, there is a story behind that story. For those of us that are personally involved in the project, we are really excited for a lot of reasons. I started out 2 years ago, leaving behind friendly Electronic Arts-Tiburon, to create a small, agile studio in North Carolina. On the first day, it was just me. And on that first day, reality started sinking in. I was lucky enough to run my own studio. It was all on me, but I had a lot of initial nervous moments.
I started building the team slowly from local talent. In addition, I was lucky enough to have a few people interested in transferring from Tiburon that had worked on the NASCAR® 360/PS3/PS2 games. They were NASCAR® veterans that loved the simulation game but also interested in trying something new. During discussions for our second project, we started talking with others at EA-Tiburon about an arcade style NASCAR game that had been kicked around from time to time. The project was not officially green-lit until we did a first playable demo that really made people take notice. We put a lot of our own time in that demo because we believed in the idea and the title. In any company, a new product is really, really hard to get off the ground. I can’t tell you how proud of the whole team I was that we got it green-lit and the product that was produced. We were also very excited for EA to give us this opportunity. NASCAR Kart Racing is the first game that we have owned from inception at the NC studio. We wanted to build it, and worked hard to get it done.