Action 52

Lore & Background

The creator of Action 52 was Vince Perri, a businessman from Miami, Florida, and owner of Active Enterprises. Perri conceived the idea after seeing his son play an illegal multicart from Taiwan. He met Mario González at a recording studio, who introduced him to developers Javier Pérez and Albert Hernández. The team was trained for a week on NES development by Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City, Utah, and given three months to complete the game, leaving little time for playtesting. González composed most of the original music, including the Cheetahmen theme, though some themes were taken from sample music by Ed Bogas for The Music Studio on the Atari ST. The NES version includes major programming flaws: games freeze, crash, have incomplete levels, and unresponsive controls. The featured game, The Cheetahmen, was intended to launch a multimedia franchise competing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, including a promotional comic, but other merchandise was cancelled. The Genesis version, developed by FarSight Technologies under Jay Obernolte, rebuilt most games from scratch, fixed many technical issues, and added color-coded difficulty levels, a Randomizer, and a music demo mode. It was playtested and had far fewer glitches.

Reader's Guide

Action 52 holds a unique place in video game history as a cautionary tale of overambition and poor execution. Its NES version is widely regarded as one of the worst games ever made, with numerous bugs, crashes, and unplayable games. The infamous contest for the game Ooze, which required completing Level 6 but crashed on Level 2, epitomizes the compilation's failures. Despite this, the Genesis version represents a significant improvement, demonstrating what could be achieved with more development time and experienced programmers. The compilation's legacy extends beyond its negative reception: it inspired a 2010 game jam called 'Action 52 Owns' that remade 23 of the games, and the 2024 game UFO 50, a compilation of 50 retro-style games by the creators of Spelunky and Downwell, drew similar ideas. For collectors, Action 52's rarity and notoriety make it a sought-after item, symbolizing the chaotic early days of unlicensed game development.

Did You Know?

• The NES version of Action 52 initially retailed for US$199, equivalent to $470 in 2025.
• The game Ooze consistently crashed on Level 2, making it impossible to qualify for a $104,000 contest without using an emulator.
• The opening sequence of the NES version uses the 'Yeah! Woo!' drum break from Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's song 'It Takes Two.'
• The Genesis version of The Cheetahmen has the titular characters rescuing cheetah cubs from Dr. Morbis and his minions.

A Place in the Compilation Lineage

Video game compilations bundle multiple titles into a single product, whether on shared physical media or within one digital package, with a menu system letting the player choose which game to launch. This format has deep roots in the industry, stretching back to official Nintendo Entertainment System multicarts that reissued earlier titles like Super Mario Bros. alongside Duck Hunt and World Class Track Meet. In the early 1990s, unlicensed publishers such as Codemasters pushed the format further with their Quattro series, packaging new games onto multicart cartridges. Action 52, put out by Active Enterprises, emerged within this same ecosystem of bundled Nintendo titles. While the broader compilation tradition would later mature into polished commercial products—Microsoft Arcade in 1993, the Atari 2600 Action Pack in 1995, the Namco Museum series on PlayStation—Action 52 represents a rougher, less refined chapter in that lineage, one where the promise of convenience came at a noticeable cost in execution.

Infamy and the Quality Question

In a landscape where compilations are generally celebrated for making classic games more accessible, Action 52 stands out for an entirely different reason: its widely noted poor quality. The title, produced by Active Enterprises, has become something of a cautionary example in discussions of bundled game collections. Where official Nintendo multicarts re-released earlier software with recognizable fidelity, and where later commercial compilations like the Sonic & Knuckles Collection or the Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits packages presented polished, curated experiences, Action 52's execution fell well short of those standards. Its reputation for low quality has made it a notable outlier, a reminder that the compilation format—regardless of how many titles it promises to deliver—can still suffer when the underlying production values are neglected. The infamy surrounding the product underscores that bundling games together does not automatically guarantee a satisfying player experience.

Preservation by Any Means

One of the more interesting aspects of the video game compilation format is its role as a vehicle for preservation. By housing multiple titles on a single piece of media or within one digital package, compilations keep older games in circulation long after their original releases have faded from store shelves. This preservation function is not limited to high-profile, officially sanctioned collections. Even in the realm of lower-budget or unlicensed products, the act of bundling games together serves to keep them playable and discoverable. Action 52, despite its well-documented quality issues, participates in this broader preservation impulse. The format it inhabits—the shared cartridge or digital bundle with a selection menu—was the same mechanism that carried the NES multicarts, the Quattro releases, and later the retro-focused collections of the 2010s and 2020s like the Cowabunga Collection and the Irem Collection series. In that sense, even a poorly executed compilation contributes to the ongoing effort to keep gaming history accessible.

The Publisher Landscape and Action 52's Context

Active Enterprises, the company behind Action 52, operated in a competitive and often unregulated corner of the video game market. The early-to-mid 1990s saw a proliferation of unlicensed and low-budget publishers attempting to capitalize on the popularity of Nintendo hardware. Codemasters, for instance, released new games through their Quattro multicart line without official licensing, while pirate compilations circulated with ROM hacks that swapped out character sprites for unauthorized imagery. Action 52 fits within this broader ecosystem of third-party and unofficial bundling efforts. The era was one of rapid commercialization of retro content, with companies like Microsoft, Atari, and Namco beginning to repackage their back catalogs for new audiences. Against that backdrop of growing industry investment in polished compilations, a product like Action 52—infamous for its low quality—highlights the wide variance in production standards that existed when the compilation format was still finding its footing as a legitimate commercial category.