Rage Software's Cancelled Racer Lamborghini Re-Emerges 20 Years Later

If you haven't heard of the racing game Lamborghini, then there's a good reason for that. The video game, which was intended to be part of a three-game deal between Liverpool studio Rage Software and the Italian car manufacturer Lamborghini, was announced back in 2002, but then quietly canceled a year later in 2003 when the development studio closed its doors. This meant it never came out on Xbox, PS2, or GameCube, as originally planned.

Nevertheless, it appears to live on (as spotted by Jalopnik), with footage of the game being played online emerging last month, thanks to the Xbox Kai Fam community. This is a group of players who get together to play old LAN games over the internet.

In the past, a playable demo of Lamborghini could be downloaded and played online, thanks to a copy included in a March 2003 issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, but that was really it! Then, earlier this year, on May 14th 2022, it appears a prototype from December 10th 2002 found its way online, giving players access to a full build that had been used to beta test Xbox Live functionality. And obviously, they wasted no time in getting the online components up and running again.

These videos show a group of players racing through levels based on Pacific Highway, Las Vegas, and Hong Kong, in a range of Lamborghinis. As the original Gamespot article states, the finished game would have included 25 different models of car, with the 350 GT, the Miura, the Countach, and the Murcielago all expected to appear.

After Rage closed, members of the studio formed another company called Juice Games in Warrington, not far from their old offices, and salvaged some of the technology behind this game. Here they created racing games like Juiced, Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, and Juiced: Eliminator, before shuttering themselves in June 2011.

Have you checked out Lamborghini yet? How do you think it holds up? Let us know!