Action 52

Little is known about Vince Perri, the creator of Action 52. Perri claimed to be a businessman from Miami, and the owner and founder of Active Enterprises. According to Perri, "I happened to see my son playing an illegal product made in Taiwan that had 40 games on it. The whole neighborhood went crazy over it ... I figured I'd do it legally. It's obvious when you see something like that, you know there's something there".[9]

In 1993, Perri showcased Action 52 at the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show.[10] He claimed to have raised $5 million for the multicart from private backers in Europe and Saudi Arabia. Perri, along with Raúl Gomila, enlisted three college students—Mario González, Javier Pérez, Albert Hernández and a fourth developer whose name is currently unknown—to do the game design, music, graphics and programming. The developers, who used an Atari ST, were given three months to complete Action 52, leaving little time for playtesting and fixing bugs. Technical work was contracted out to Cronos Engineering, Inc., based in Boca Raton, Florida. Cronos had previously done work for IBM.[9] González, one of the programmers, says that Action 52's developers were flown to Salt Lake City, Utah, to work with a video game company there, the name of which he does not remember. However, he does recall that the company was developing an NES adaptation of Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back; this would identify the company as Sculptured Software. Corroborating this is Action 52's use of Sculptured Software's NES music engine.[11] Several pieces of music in the NES version of Action 52 were plagiarized from sample music composed by Ed Bogas for The Music Studio, published by Activision for the Atari ST.[12] The games with plagiarized music include Fuzz Power, Silver Sword, French Baker, Streemerz, Time Warp Tickers and Ninja Assault.

González also confirms that, in addition to many unused tiles, Action 52 has 8 extra game templates, because the distributor configured the cartridges to contain 60 games by default.

According to González, the gaming press's characterization of Action 52 as a "scam" is incorrect. He says that Perri, inspired by his neighborhood's reaction to the Taiwanese compilation, fully intended, at least in the beginning, to create and market a legitimate multicart. However, Perri knew little about the video game business when he launched his venture, and as a result made serious errors, such as entrusting the project to programmers who had too little experience, and giving them an insufficient length of time to develop Action 52. Perri's expectation that the multicart would launch a multimedia Cheetahmen franchise were similarly not well-founded, given the low quality of Action 52.

The Sega Genesis version of Action 52 was developed by FarSight Technologies, under the direction of Jay Obernolte, using a Macintosh LC.[13] FarSight's experienced programmers, along with Pérez and Hernández, two of the programmers of the NES version,[lower-alpha 1] were allowed to spend a year developing this version, and FarSight insisted that Active Enterprises playtest it before its release. The resulting multicart had far fewer glitches than the NES version released two years before.

Mark Steven Miller and Jason Scher of Nu Romantic Productions composed the music for the Genesis version, in 48 hours.

Active Enterprises planned to have FarSight develop another multicart titled Sports 5. However, Active Enterprises folded without releasing either game, and no copies of them are known to exist.

Two different kinds of NES Action 52 prototype cartridges are known to have been produced. Prototype I, made first, has a blue circuit board inside a transparent case, with a solid blue label. Prototype II has a transparent case as well, with a black circuit board and a transparent label. Active Enterprises is embossed on the underside of the Prototype II cartridge. The cartridge released to the public resembles Prototype II, but has a green circuit board. It is believed that more cartridges were produced of Prototype II than of Prototype I, but this is not known for certain.[14]

As may be expected, the software on the prototype cartridges is in an even less finished state than that on the released cartridges. The biggest difference is that the game The Cheetahmen is missing from the prototypes, which instead include a different game, titled Action Gamer, as the 52nd game. It has only two levels, one of which is incomplete, and appears to be an abandoned initial attempt to create a Cheetahmen game.[lower-alpha 2] Action Gamer was not put aside entirely, however; it was reworked into Ooze (the fifth game of the multicart).[15] Most of the other differences between the prototypes and the released product are minor, such as menu screens that have generic headers and footers in the prototypes, as well as game title text that varies from the final version, and menu backgrounds in different colors. The menu template of the prototypes is identical to that of other, illegal multicarts containing 52 pirated games, indicating that the code for Action 52 is based on the code for the pirate multicarts.[15]

In 2010, a Prototype I cartridge surfaced.[14] While Action 52 was in development, Perri had asked movie and video game distributor Greg Pabich to be a partner in Active Enterprises. Pabich turned Perri down, for several reasons, but kept one of the Prototype I cartridges. It was stored in Pabich's warehouse for over twenty years before it was rediscovered. Pabich had the ROM data for Action Gamer stripped from the cartridge, and the game's code completed. He released the result as Cheetahmen: The Creation on November 11, 2011;[16] boxed, red game cartridges, in a limited edition of 1,000, came with a reproduction of the Cheetahmen comic book that had been included with Action 52. A "Special Collector's Edition" was also sold; in addition to the cartridge (in green instead of red) and the comic book, an additional, boxed, sealed cartridge (with a transparent case), a music CD, a T-shirt and a poster were included. This edition was limited to 500.[17]

In August 2012, another Prototype I cartridge was put up for auction on eBay, along with its original box, marked "SAMPLE—Not for sale—Demonstration purposes only". Various rare Action 52 promotional materials were included as well. The seller started a blog, in which he identified himself as "Action 52 Developer #4", and related his part in the creation of the multicart. His cartridge and Perri's are the only two examples of Prototype I that are known to still exist.[18]

Critical reaction to Action 52 has been consistently negative. AllGame editor Skyler Miller described the game as an "unlicensed but legal multicart" containing "NES games of extremely poor quality".[19]

• List of commercial failures in video gaming
• List of video games notable for negative reception
• Caltron 6 in 1
• Cassette 50
• Don't Buy This

• List of all Action 52 games — A comprehensive website detailing all 52 of the games in the compilation.
• Active Enterprises exposed — A website with information on both Action 52 and Active Enterprises.
• Cheetahmengames.com — Official website of The Cheetahmen.
• Action52Prototype.com — Action 52 Developer #4's firsthand story of the development of Action 52 and the rare Action 52 prototype NES game cartridge.