NASCAR 25 is ‘the game we’ve always wanted to make’
NASCAR 25's Director of Production, Matt Lewis, explains how over 20 years of work on EA, Papyrus and 704Games titles across the development team is being put to use.
The official NASCAR gaming lineage stretches back over 30 years, and through that time, there have been many highs – Dirt to Daytona, NASCAR Racing 2003 Season – and many, many lows.
With this context, the pressure on iRacing Studios to deliver a great game with its first attempt, NASCAR 25, is immense.
Many fans of real-world motorsport long for a solid video game version, and can be very vocal when, after months of hype, that may not turn out to be the case.
For the development team tasked with this upcoming new instalment, they’ve seen it all before.
Formerly Monster Games, although now just known internally as ‘the NASCAR development team’ within the ever-expanding iRacing and iRacing Studios business, the majority of the team have worked on several prior official releases.
Some worked on the lauded Papyrus Design Group stock car simulations, and some worked under Electronic Arts when the Redwood City-based mega-corp controlled the rights to the series.
According to senior people on the project, NASCAR 25 (and presumably future follow-ups as part of a publicly stated initial “three-to-five year plan”) should turn out to be something they’ve wanted to make for over 20 years.
“Way back, this is making Mike DeVault [NASCAR 25 Creative Director] and I look like old men, I would say in 2004 or 2005, there were some really rough weeks and months at EA,” explains NASCAR 25’s Director of Production, Matt Lewis.
Perhaps best known for its Madden, soccer (FIFA and EA FC), Battlefield and Need for Speed games in recent years, EA created NASCAR games between 1998 and 2009.
“If you remember, there were articles at the time of how EA was overworking its employees and everything was deadline-driven, and you ended up working 80-90-hour weeks to get these games out the door.
“Back in the day, there was no online, so no ability to update a game. You put out a game and if it had issues, then those issues were going to be in there forever.
“It was a different level of pressure than we have now, because [now] you still don’t want to have a big issue when you ship a game, but if there is, you can always go back and fix it.
“In the late nights – I’m talking 1, 2, or 3 am in the morning sometimes – Mike [DeVault] and I were primarily responsible for the AI. Once we got to a point where [the game] was in alpha, most of our work was largely done. There would be an occasional bug that came in, but for the most part, we were playing the game and getting ideas for next year.
“At 2 am-ish in the morning, engineers are finishing up trying to knock out bugs so we can all go home. There was a bug counter on the wall and we had to reach [a set] number before anybody could go home.
“But [during that time] we’d be playing Papyrus’ 2003 NASCAR game.
“All the [EA NASCAR] designers, all the producers, were having a blast. We’re like: ‘Man, if we could ever get the physics and the multiplayer of this game [NR 2003] with what we’re doing in career mode, with what Hasbro/Infogrames at the time was doing with the progression of Dirt to Daytona into one game, then that would be amazing. That would be the North Star, right?
“That’s literally what we’re doing now [with NASCAR 25].”
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. Image: Justin Melillo
A complicated business history
The genial Lewis worked at EA between 2001 and 2015, before moving to 704Games to oversee the NASCAR Heat releases.
While those Heat platforms are generally regarded as solid, the team parted ways with Motorsport Games in 2019, which by this time had invested in 704 and then taken over the NASCAR gaming properties.
Lewis stayed with Monster Games as it worked on two eponymous Tony Stewart games, SRX: The Gameand then on two World of Outlaws games after iRacing purchased the studio in early 2022.
Meanwhile, the rights to make NASCAR console and PC games stayed with Motorsport Games, which rehashed NASCAR Heat 4 (originally created by Monster Games) with an updated roster as Heat 5, before the cataclysmic NASCAR 21: Ignition, plus two Switch spin-offs and some DLC.
“I’d love to tell you there was a 20-year orchestrated plan where we all sketched this out on a whiteboard somewhere and really strategised it, but it didn’t really happen that way.
“It’s just fast forward 25 years, and that’s exactly what ended up happening through acquisitions and business deals.”
So, is NASCAR 25 the game the team always wanted to make?
“[This story] is a really long [way of] answering yes. This is absolutely what we wanted to build, even 22-23 years ago. It’s crazy,” he explains, backed up by DeVault:
“I think if you had told us back then that this would eventually happen and that we would be doing it, we would have thought you were crazy.”
NASCAR 25 is under a month away from release, and while its creators are clear that this is the beginning – with further requested features affirmed to be on a roadmap for future releases – it also marks the end of a two-decade-long journey.
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