By Andrew Riepe
How did I get here on the shores of Authors’ Lounge?
Besides having a vivid imagination and a love of creative writing going back to when I was old enough to put pencil to paper, my journey began with video games and documentaries. Whenever I would play something with a fair bit of meat on the bone like Ocarina Of Time or Mario RPG: Legend Of The Seven Stars, I’d breeze the hours by with anything from Ken Burns’ miniseries on Prohibition to OSW Review’s dissection of pro wrestling events from the ‘80s onward. On one of those days, my conquest through the digiverse was accompanied by the Angry Video Game Nerd, a pioneer in the online reviewer genre from the formative years of YouTube. The subject of his brand of caustic critiques for that video? Action 52.
52 games on one see-through plastic NES cartridge sold for the same price of a brand-new Super Nintendo. It was ambitious for 1991, but undercut by the sheer amount of glitches. Thing had more bugs than a big green trash can on pickup day. But there was something about it that drew me in like a moth to a flame. The catchy music, the baffling choices for enemy character sprites, the Cheetahmen in all their early ‘90s fist-pumping glory. How could something that achieved the inverse of Nirvana see a retail release? I made it my mission to find out all I can about how A52 came to be.
Turns out a New York transplant in a sleepy Florida neighborhood, a former investment banker named Vince Perri, had a son who came across a pirated multicart from Taiwan that had 50 games on it. Impressed by this technological oddity, he decided to make his own version, but legally. He then recruited a group of college students with some faint programming experience, sent them to Sculptured Software’s studios in Salt Lake City to learn how to work with the NES architecture and brought them back to make the whole thing in just three months. It took many long nights in a recording studio nicknamed “The Cave” due to the lack of natural sunlight and thick soundproof insulation, keeping themselves going with donuts and coffee.
Even when the goalposts were moved at the eleventh hour to include a mascot platformer to capitalize on the red-hot popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the abrupt exodus of the lead programmer/composer, the Active Enterprises development team managed to get all 52 games out by the deadline.
Plans for Action 52 didn’t stop on the 8-bit NES as a markedly superior 16-bit port was completed for the SEGA Genesis, one for the Super Nintendo that never made past the conceptual stage and an unreleased standalone game for the Cheetahmen, Active Enterprises’ mascots. Comic books, TV series, movies, action figures, even animatronic Cheetahmen for trade shows were all suggested, but all amounted to vaporware before A.E. itself faded in the ether.
Despite its reputation as one of the worst reviewed video games of all time, Action 52 has enjoyed a cult following ranging from fanmade reworks of the games, orchestral covers of the soundtrack and even inclusion as a National Video Game Museum exhibit. After so long reviewing every game, interviewing everyone I can find with connections to the project and piecing the timeline together, would I be able to provide a reasonable account for one of gaming’s strangest entries?
Make your selection now and find out.
