Cruis'n USA © 1994 Midway.
Designed by the legendary Eugene Jarvis (creator of, among other things, Robotron and Defender), Cruis'n USA is a point-to-point racing game featuring fourteen separate courses set in a number of different US locations.
Each race takes place against nine other rival cars. In addition to the player's opponents, the roads are packed with civilian traffic that must be avoided. Any collision with either other vehicles or with trackside objects will result in lost time as the player races against both the clock and the nine rival racers. On many tracks, collisions can be avoided by driving off-road, although this has as inverse effect on both handling and speed.
The in-game physics are skewed entirely toward arcade-style handling. The aforementioned collisions have vehicles bouncing and spinning as though made of rubber, before righting themselves back on the track.
Although Cruis'n USA was advertised as running on Ultra 64 hardware (based on the Nintendo 64's hardware), it was actually implemented on the Midway V-unit hardware. The hardware consisted of a TMS32031 CPU clocked at 50 MHz, an ADSP-2115 DSP clocked at 10 MHz for sound and a custom 3D chip that could render perspective-correct but unfiltered quads at a high resolution (512 x 400 pixels).
Players: 2
Control: paddle
Buttons: 6
Released in November 1994. Cruis'n USA was the first game to be released on the Midway V Unit. Cruis'n USA is also the first driving game to feature digitized (taken from actual footage) textures.
Cruis'n USA and Killer Instinct were both released as public previews of the upcoming Nintendo Ultra 64 console (later renamed the Nintendo 64).
The Nintendo 64's hardware is totally different from both of the games' hardware (in fact, both games' hardware are also different from each other) and in many ways inferior, so neither game actually represented the Nintendo 64 console system that the games claim to.
The game was released in upright, sit-down, and full motion cabinets. The upright and sit-down machines support linked play, up to a two game maximum.
A Cruis'n USA unit appears in the 2002 movie 'Van Wilder'.
