Retrospective | Video Games
Action 52: Lessons We Can Learn from the Worst Video Game in History
The Day Indie Games (Briefly) Came to the NES…
It’s the Plan 9 From Outer Space of video games. Anyone with an ear to the ground when it comes to gaming has heard all about the unmitigated disaster that is Action 52, an unlicensed NES title from 1991 that claimed to offer fifty-two games on one cartridge. Those fifty-two games add up to one unplayable mess: it isn’t just a bad game, it’s a hallucinatory roller-coaster ride through the mind of a sleep-deprived programmer.
There’s a Gulf War game featuring a giant boss-monster amalgamation of Satan and Saddam Hussein. Another game has you fending off psychedelic green Elton John heads. Yet another finds the hero using a lollipop to slaughter anthropomorphic candy. Those are just the more discernible games on the cartridge: many of them can only be described as groups of blobs chasing each other. None of Action 52’s games are winnable.
I’m one of the (lucky?) few who happened to play it on the NES at the time of its release, as a video game rental. The clerk, probably a college student, warned me that it wasn’t very good and to try something else instead, but I was mesmerized by the concept. One game was awesome, so how much more awesome would fifty-two be? And the prospect of so many games hiding on one cartridge seemed like witchcraft. What secret powers did the technology hold that Nintendo didn’t want us to know about?
Those fifty-two games add up to one unplayable mess: it isn’t just a bad game, it’s a hallucinatory roller-coaster ride through the mind of a sleep-deprived programmer.
Less than two hours later, the mystery had been thoroughly and disappointingly solved. I returned the cartridge that same day, to the same amused clerk, and put his graciously offered refund towards renting a Super Nintendo and Super Castlevania IV instead. Later that year, an SNES would be waiting under the Christmas tree. Action 52, for better or worse, was almost certainly the last new 8-bit game that I ever played.
The man behind Action 52, Vince Perri of Active Entertainment, has been a mystery ever since he seemed to appear from nowhere to promote the game and then disappeared just as quickly after its failure. What we do know about the game’s origins, thanks in part to determined fan research and in part to one of the original developers being willing to share his account of its creation, has become the stuff of internet legend.
But there’s a lesson to be found beyond a morbid fascination of how such a disastrous game came to exist — a message that’s more relevant than ever in the age of indie startups and the creator economy. It’s the lesson behind the rise and fall of Action 52, one of the NES’s only indie games.
And Now… the Cheetahmen
History, it’s said, swings back and forth like a pendulum. When the first video games were created in the 1960s and 70s, they were the very definition of indie productions. Mainframe programmers worked on them in their spare time and distributed the games to other programmers without any commercial market. Spacewar! was written in 1962 on MIT’s PDP-1 computer when it wasn’t being used by the school. ELIZA, one of the world’s first chatbots, was created in 1966 as a demonstration of AI’s inability to communicate with humans (its unexpected success and popularity undermined that point). One of the first and most famous text adventure games, Colossal Cave Adventure, was created by ARPANET developer Will Crowther as a way to connect with his daughters.
Right now we’re on the same side of that pendulum swing. With a thriving online economy, numerous distribution platforms, and robust developer tools for creating everything from open-world games to visual novels, it’s entirely possible for a single creator working on their own time to launch a successful game. We’ve had indie music and movies for decades, and now indie games have come into their own as a successful niche.
That wasn’t true in the early console era. Back then, the pendulum was on the opposite side. If you wanted to release a respectable NES game, you had to pay a license for the Seal of Quality and submit the game for review: Nintendo’s marketing made sure that fans perceived any cartridges without that seal as shady, possibly criminal affairs. If you decided to do without the Seal of Quality, that meant finding ways to bypass the console’s built-in lockout mechanism, and, even then, you still had to write the game in proprietary code, then manufacture and distribute the cartridges yourself on a nationwide — if not global — scale. It wasn’t a one-man job.
For Action 52, it was a four-man job.
Mario Gonzalez — writer, artist, and composer for Action 52, and the only developer who’s come forward to talk about the experience — has recounted how creator Vince Perri was inspired by bootleg NES cartridges that could hold dozens of pirated games and wondered why nobody had tried to make a legitimate game with the same technology. He quickly recruited a trio of college programmers, including Gonzalez, and added an unknown fourth developer late into production. They were rushed off to a week’s training on the NES dev kit and given three months to finish the game.
Rumors circulated for years that the whole thing was a scam, that the production was outsourced to eastern Europe, or that the game was part of a con to swindle investors. But according to Gonzalez, that wasn’t the case, and history seems to be on his side. Perri promoted the game far and wide, and the booklet included ads for action figures and an animated series starring the game’s mascots, the Cheetahmen. Neither came to pass, but he did release a slightly more polished Genesis port two years later. The next year found him announcing a handheld console at the 1994 Consumer Electronic Show, and two years later — by which point both the company and Perri had disappeared — buggy, incomplete prototype cartridges for the unreleased Cheetahmen II were found in a Florida warehouse.
Active Entertainment even put together an animated commercial for Action 52 that gives us a peek at just what that Cheetahmen cartoon might have looked like. There’s some disagreement on whether it ever actually made it onto the air, but Mario posted a copy on YouTube for posterity:
It isn’t all that bad. It’s cheesy, but no more so than Street Sharks or Biker Mice from Mars. The voices are competent, the personalities are distinct, and the tone’s light enough that we end up laughing with the commercial rather than at it. Worse cartoons than this have made it big.
So there was a game, a plan to launch a cartoon brand out of it, plans for toys based on them, and a half-developed sequel, all over the course of several years. This wasn’t just a get-rich-quick scheme: there’s some real work put into the marketing side of Action 52. What went wrong?
The Secret of the Ooze
For one thing, the game was very late to the party. The highly anticipated Super Nintendo had already been released the year before: fifty-two games in one or not, the NES was old news. What’s more, the animal-hero cartoon wave that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had started in 1987, and that the Cheetahmen tried to surf in on, had just about washed out. Almost exactly one year after Action 52’s release Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men: The Animated Series made their debut. Totally radical animals were out, gritty comic-book heroes with mature storylines were in. Even if the stars had lined up perfectly for the Cheetahmen’s launch as a media franchise, they might’ve found themselves becoming irrelevant in the ‘90s.
And there was the wild optimism of some of Perri’s claims. His proposed handheld console, the “Action Gamemaster,” wouldn’t merely feature a color screen — a major selling point on its own, given that its biggest competitor would’ve been the monochrome Game Boy — but a CD-ROM and compatibility with NES, Genesis, and SNES games. Even putting aside the issues of legality and cost (the projected price tag was $500, a little over a thousand dollars in 2023), it’s hard to imagine how such a Frankenstein’s monster of a device could possibly fit into anyone’s hand. At any rate, there’s no evidence it ever got any further than the concept art.
Even if the stars had lined up perfectly for the Cheetahmen’s launch as a media franchise, they might’ve found themselves becoming irrelevant in the ‘90s.
But those things aren’t what made Action 52 infamous. It all comes down to the games. With three months of development by a team of four, and no beta testing or oversight of any sort, very few of the titles could ever be described as “fun” and none of them actually work. The rare few that can be completed just loop unceremoniously back to the first level. Two of the games don’t work at all, loading a blank screen when launched. Most of the others will glitch somewhere over the course of the game, either resetting the cartridge itself or locking up and forcing the player to reset.
This includes the game “Ooze,” which promised a $104,000 reward ($52,000 in cash and another $52,000 in a matching scholarship because “Action 52,” get it?) to the first player who mailed in a photograph of a secret code on its victory screen. The data can be found on the cartridge, so the offer seems to have been genuine, but a glitch made it impossible to finish the game. The winning code, for what it’s worth, was 7A3H9JOP2R4A2C7S.
Once again, we find Action Entertainment’s trademark combination of a half-decent marketing idea and an apparently sincere effort completely undone by incompetence in the execution. That’s where the game becomes a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs and a lesson on the dangers of the Dunning-Kruger effect: we don’t know what we don’t know.
What We Don’t Know
Apart from the onus of working with the NES’s proprietary cartridges, there’s no reason a small indie team of game developers couldn’t succeed. Although id Software had already found success with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom’s core development team was just as small as Action 52’s, and that now-legendary game’s schedule from conception to release in 1993 was about one year. But its developers had experience and relationships within the game industry. They understood what they were getting into.
When Perri asked Gonzalez, Albert Hernández, and Javier Pérez to join his company as Action 52’s developers, they’d never created a commercial game before and had no idea how long it might take. They were just excited by the opportunity. None of them had any way of judging whether a week would be long enough for training on the Nintendo dev kit or whether three months was a reasonable lead time for building a game.
They had to trust Perri when it came to the logistics, but Perri didn’t know anything about game development. He understood marketing, which, taken in isolation, is the one thing Active Entertainment got right. But he seemed to think that was the hard part. “If you build it,” as the movie line goes, “they will come.” Or, to quote Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss, “I started by reasoning that anything I don’t understand is easy to do.”
And that’s the crux of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon documented in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Accurately gauging one’s own knowledge of a subject requires some minimal level of awareness about that subject. So, ironically, we’re most prone to overestimating our competence at the very things we know the least about because we don’t really understand what’s involved. To a driver, “fix the car” sounds like a single step: to a mechanic, it’s dozens or hundreds of steps. It isn’t just that we have gaps in our knowledge, it’s that we can’t usually see those gaps. We look at a Picasso painting and think “anyone could do that” with no awareness of the intricacies involved in even mixing the palette, let alone composition or technique.
None of Action 52’s developers were actually bad at their jobs. Gonzalez in particular has built a reputation as a musician, and The Cheetahmen’s theme tune has become a cult classic among retro gaming fans:
But they didn’t know enough about game development to recognize the gaps in their knowledge and realize when they were in over their heads. Perri seems to have been a capable enough promoter, but his knowledge of video games seems to have gone as far as seeing his son play a pirated multigame cartridge and thinking “anyone could do that.” He didn’t know what he didn’t know, and he didn’t have anyone else around to point the gaps out to him. So he charged along at full speed, crashed into a brick wall of inexperience, and afterward vanished from the public eye.
The lesson to take away from Action 52 is to never let our enthusiasm overwhelm our sense of prudence when it comes to trying something new. If something you’ve never done before seems “easy,” step back, listen to the experts and ask yourself whether it’s really as simple as it looks or if the Dunning-Kruger effect is kicking in and blinding you to its nuances. Nobody can be expected to know everything, and anyone who says they do is betraying their ignorance of life’s complexities. “The only true wisdom,” as Socrates put it, “is in knowing that you know nothing.”
Also, if you’re ever in charge of making a video game, maybe plug it in and give it a try before putting it up for sale, just to make sure it works.
Thank you for reading! Each Friday I’ll be posting a new article covering science, philosophy, psychology, pop culture — pretty much everything I think is interesting and worth talking about. If you’d like a sneak preview of this month’s upcoming articles, you can always find them on jeffereymoore.com.
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