A prototype for the unreleased and unannounced #CrashvsSpyroRacing has been found and preserved online:

A prototype for an unreleased Xbox game called Crash vs Spyro Racing has been discovered on a hard drive from an old development kit.

A few weeks ago, YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer got ahold of a hard drive from a development kit for the original Xbox. That drive included a handful of prototypes for games originally in development at a British studio called Eutechnyx. Some of the especially notable builds included an early version of 2005 Ford vs Chevy game, and the never-released Xbox version of the 2006 The Fast and the Furious tie-in.

Now, MVG has discovered something else on that hard drive: a prototype of a game called Crash vs Spyro Racing. Not only had this game never actually been released, it had never even been announced. It seems this game was in development in 2004 at a company called LT Studios, a subsidiary of Argonaut Games, the legendary British developer that worked with Nintendo to create Star Fox and the SNES's Super FX chip.

The actual prototype of Crash vs Spyro Racing is extremely limited, and doesn't even feature much in the way of recognizable elements from the Spyro or Crash series - beyond the latter's crates, that is. However, the name of the executable file and a rough FMV sequence make the game's identity clear. Over a year ago, an Italian article on a Crash fansite featured a brief report on Crash vs Spyro Racing, including an image of the game's title screen, seemingly based on existing artwork from Crash Team Racing, but this is apparently the only previous word of the game to reach the public.

MVG's been unable to dig up any additional information on the prototype, and it's unclear how deep into development this actually got. It's possible that this prototype was built as a pitch to the license holder Universal Interactive (which was swallowed up by Vivendi and then Activision Blizzard in the years that followed) and never got the greenlight.

It's a fascinating bit of history in any case, and in the video MVG offers some instructions on how to play the prototype with an emulator or a modded Xbox.