Trivia / Cruis'n

• Channel Hop: The first two titles were developed and released in arcades by Midway Games, while the N64 ports were published by Nintendo as part of the original "Ultra 64" deal. Midway published the N64 Exotica themselves, though Nintendo retained rights to the series, which is why Midway also had to include Nintendo in the copyright notice despite the game being entirely Midway. Likewise with Velocity, which has no arcade counterpart, and the Wii entry, titled simply Cruis'n, which also had zero Nintendo involvement at all (it's actually a port of the first Fast and the Furious arcade game by Raw Thrills, which was started by Cruis'n creator Eugene Jarvis when Midway quit the arcade business). When Midway filed for bankruptcy two years later, Nintendo took full ownership of the franchise. Raw Thrills subsequently got a license from Nintendo to develop Cruis'n Blast in 2017, and published the Switch port four years later.
• Follow the Leader: California Speed was cut from much the same cloth as Cruis'n. Ditto with the Gameloft-developed Asphalt series which also took a similar over-the-top premise.
• Lying Creator: As stated, USA was originally advertised as using real Ultra 64 hardware. This was actually untrue from the outset; the arcade version used proprietary Midway-based hardware. Presumably the original intention was that the eventual console would use hardware similar to the arcade version or at least good enough to warrant an Arcade-Perfect Port, but it seems Nintendo vastly overestimated just how good the console would actually be. Even the port of World, which was still decidedly much more faithful to the arcade version, still had to water down the graphics some so it could fit. Though if there's any consolation, the N64 port had the advantage of texture filtering as typical with most games released for the platform.
• Money, Dear Boy: Why the Nintendo Switch port of Blast exists; Raw Thrills usually keeps their games in the arcades, but when the COVID-19 Pandemic began, Raw Thrills weren't selling full arcade units, and the start of 2021 wasn't treating them much better. The port was basically born out of the company looking for ways to stay afloat under such circumstances, so it counts as a Justified Trope. It should be noted however that most games from the series did receive home conversions not long after their arcade release.
• Prop Recycling: All of the additional tracks in the Switch version of Blast are taken from Super Bikes 3, another arcade game by Raw Thrills that shares many elements with Blast, including the same gameplay, announcers, and "engine revving" sound effects.
• Sequel Gap: Not counting the GBA spinoff, there was a seven year gap between Exotica and the Wii reboot, and another ten between it and Blast. Of course, that's not too surprising, given that arcades haven't been very popular in the USA since the turn of the century and the series' very simplistic style of gameplay never fit too well on home consoles.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Wii game wasn't always intended to be a Dolled-Up Installment; it was originally planned to be a straight port of The Fast and the Furious arcade game, only being hastily remodeled into a Cruis'n game when it became clear they weren't gonna get the license.
  • A screenshot◊ of the arcade version of Exotica suggests they were going to license the Dodge Viper RT-10. A relic of this is left in the final game, where the bonus car rewarded for earning 5000 miles is referred to as the Viper in the audits menu, and it's probably why the N64 version has a Fauxrrari version of the Viper, the Mach 4.