NASCAR 09

NASCAR 09 is the twelfth installment in the EA Sports NASCAR series and the successor to the 2007 game NASCAR 08. It was developed by EA Tiburon and released on June 10, 2008, in North America for PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and mobile phones. On March 12, 2008, EA announced that Jeff Gordon would be the cover model for NASCAR 09. In the career mode "Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup," Gordon leads a mentoring program, a new feature offered in NASCAR 09. This is also the third EA Sports NASCAR video game to be released for mobile phones. In October 2007, Electronic Arts moved development of the PlayStation 2 game to a new studio in North Carolina in order to get better information from the NASCAR teams and thus improve the game. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game continued to be developed at the old studio. Because the development team used certain resources to work on important features of the game, no car manufacturers were represented in the game that year. To date, this is the last NASCAR game produced by EA and the last NASCAR game for the PlayStation 2, after suffering from declining sales, difficulties in installing new features, and a lack of popularity. In 2009, NASCAR Kart Racing was released, replacing all 2009 installments of the annual series. It may be EA's last game before their exclusive license with NASCAR expires. However, the door to NASCAR games for the PlayStation 2 is closed, as Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 5 was not offered for the sixth-generation console. For players in Canada, the game was still released in English only, but the instruction manual and packaging were bilingual with text in English and French.