Cruis'n USA review: a road trip you could finish on a Saturday

You sit down. You grab the wheel. A highway opens up in front of you with the whole country at the far end of it. Cruis'n USA did not sell a car. It sold a trip, the kind most kids had only seen from the back seat.

What kind of racer is it, really?

It is not a simulation and never pretends to be. The cars bounce, the traffic is placed to be clipped, and the handling rewards nerve more than skill. The game is built on a simple rule: you must reach first place to advance. Finish second and the trip is over.

That rule turns every leg into a small, tense story. The timer is always running, and checkpoints buy you more time, so you are constantly doing arithmetic with your foot. Brake for the curve and lose seconds, or take it flat and hope the oncoming truck is in the other lane.

A racing game does not need realism. It needs a place you want to reach.

The map is the pitch

The race begins in San Francisco and works its way east, through desert and farmland and city streets, all the way to Washington, D.C. If you make it through every track, you are congratulated by then-President Bill Clinton, which was exactly as funny and strange then as it sounds now. The places are only loosely like themselves, but that never mattered. Each new stretch of road was a postcard, and the next postcard cost one more credit.

One small touch says a lot about who it was built for: a music button on the dash, so you could change the song mid-race, exactly the way you fought over the radio on a real family drive. It was directed by Eugene Jarvis and developed by TV Games Inc., and it played like a game made by people who remembered being in the back seat.

What it meant back then

In the mid-nineties the sit-down driving cabinet was the big-ticket machine in any American arcade. It stood near the front of the mall arcade, at the bowling alley, in the lobby of the movie theater where your older brother worked the concession stand. Two cabinets side by side meant you could race a friend, and the loser paid for the next round or the pizza. Nobody cared that the handling was loose. You were crossing the country, and you had a best friend in the next seat trying to run you off the road.

Playing it today

It is shallower than the racers that followed it, and you will see through the physics in a few minutes. But the feeling of a destination is still there. Put someone in front of it and they will want to see one more state before they stop, which is the whole trick, and it still works.