There seems to be a new Cruis’n arcade game in the wild, as arcade enthusiast hub Arcade Heroes reports that arcade game maker Raw Thrills has licensed the property from Nintendo to create Cruis’n Adventure.
What’s interesting here is that there hasn’t been a new Cruis’n arcade game in nearly twenty years, despite the fact that Cruis’n USA, Cruis’n World and Cruis’n Exotica were common American arcade fixtures in the late ’90s.
This is also a bit of a return to form for game industry veteran Eugene Jarvis, who served as the director on the original trilogy of Cruis’n arcade games during his time at Midway Games. He cofounded Raw Thrills in 2001 after leaving Midway, and now he seems to have regained the Cruis’n license from Nintendo — Raw Thrills confirmed to Arcade Heroes that Cruis’n Adventure is being tested now (at least one cabinet was spotted in Chicago) ahead of a wider release.
Incidentally, in the years since Cruis’n Exotica came to arcades (and later, consoles) in ’99 the Cruis’n license has been applied to a number of non-arcade games published by Midway, including Cruis’n Velocity for the Game Boy Advance and Cruis’n for the Wii.
The latter was actually heavily based on the Raw Thrills arcade game The Fast and the Furious, which was also designed by Jarvis. He spoke at length about his thoughts on arcade game design and the work of Raw Thrills in this 2007 conversation with Gamasutra.