Need for Speed: The Run Is a Video Game, if This Leaked Trailer, Box Art and Release Date Are to Be Believed

If there is any greater bane of game publishers everywhere than that of enthusiast press, it's retailers. Get a marketing/sales executive good and drunk some night, and they will undoubtedly regale you with tempestuous tales of botched campaigns, miserable sales meetings, and precisely the kind of wanton disregard for confidentiality that reared its ugly head today, when UK retailer ShopTo.net decided to just up and post a bunch of info for the as-yet-unannounced EA racing game, Need for Speed: The Run.
Whoops.

Merely letting slip the simple existence of such a title would typically be an amusing enough foible, but this time, ShopTo even posted the box art (which you can see immediately to the right of this sentence), a short cinematic trailer (which is embedded via grainy YouTube link below--be forewarned, it may get pulled at any moment), and a release date of November 18, 2011 in the UK. Hey, that's my birthday!

Just in case it gets pulled, the trailer offers a glimpse of a return to story-based driving for the series. It's got racing, cop chases, and a guy about to get killed by a speeding train, as well as the tag line "The Race of Your Life." Though we see no sign of him in the trailer, we can only hope and pray that The Run will mark the return of Razor Callahan, for whom we at Giant Bomb have left a candle burning lo these many absent years. Please, come home to us, Razor. We miss you terribly. == TEASER ==