Released in arcades by Midway & Nintendo in 1994, Cruis'n USA is a racing game that also served as a prototype for the Nintendo Ultra 64 system (along with the arcade version of "Killer Instinct"), which would later be scaled down and become the Nintendo 64 console. The game was a simple arcade racing game where players could choose 10 different areas of the USA to race through (all real) or play the game's story mode, Cruise The USA, where the player drives through 14 stages starting in San Francisco, CA across the country to Washington, DC to jam with the US President in a hot tub at the end. Some units could be linked together locally by a LAN network, allowing simultaneous multiplayer for 2 players. There were 4 cars to choose from, with 2 designs for each car.
It featured unrealistic physics as colliding with other cars or oncoming traffic simply caused you to be spun around or bounced up into the air...although, if you watch closely, there was one point where I actually drove through the back of a tour bus and nothing bad happened! If the player finished a race in first place, they got to continue for free. However, the computer AI was such that it would never let you get too far ahead, and the slightest mess-up would drop you back a lot. There was no limit on how long play can go except in Cruise The USA, where completing the entire road trip ends the game as you see a vehicle on top of the White House with a cartoon of the President with two bikini-clad girls in a hot tub...good thing it was 1994 because in today's landscape, and given who the President was at the time...it would bot have gone over very well! You also get to see the credits.
A scaled-down version was released for the Nintendo 64 upon the console's launch in 1996, while the Cruis'n franchise has remained a mainstay in arcades for 30 years now with the latest entry, 2017's "Cruis'n Blast" (which came after Nintendo licensed the franchise to original game developer Eugene Jarvis' Raw Thrills studio), still easily found in arcades, entertainment centers, movie theaters and wherever you might find arcade machines.
(Note: There were multiple revisions and re-releases of the game after it debuted in arcades. This video features version 4.4/4.5, which appears to be the final revision. Compared to earlier versions, the changes are mainly found in the music being slightly different and the high score entry & story mode between-race sequence frame rates have been considerably smoothed out and sped up)
Recorded 4/11/24 using OBS Studio. Edited using OpenShot Video Editor.