Blame Tengen.

They had nothing to do with it directly, but they’re responsible for the whole ugly affair regardless.

You see, back in the day, only Nintendo could manufacture cartridges for the NES. No matter whose name appeared on the label – Konami, Capcom, Acclaim, whichever – the actual hardware all came from Nintendo themselves. It had to. The NES architecture contained a “lockout chip,” patented by Nintendo of America, that prohibited “unauthorized” cartridges from playing in the system, and thus, it was hoped, would curtail the proliferation of poor-quality games from fly-by-night third parties, which was one of the major contributing factors to the catastrophic Great Crash of ’83, when the Atari 2600 market suffered from precisely this ailment.

Tengen, however, saw things a different way. The subsidiary of Atari Games, at the time a well-behaved NES licensee, saw this as an attempt to monopolize the home video game industry, and to impose their will on all would-be NES developers (as all games were subject to Nintendo’s “approval” before they would be released, and Nintendo of America was at this point at their censorship-happy peak). With a combination of reverse engineering and programming acumen, Tengen was able to “crack” the lockout chip by way of manufacturing their own compatible device. Nintendo, obviously, cried foul over this, but Tengen was able to convince federal judges they had not used one byte of Nintendo’s proprietary code in their device; it was all a result of their own research, and any resemblance between their work and Nintendo’s was, as they say in movies, purely coincidental.

The good news was, Tengen’s court victory opened the doors for other companies to produce their own NES cartridges without having to first submit them to Nintendo.

The bad news was, most of those companies produced some really crappy games.

And of all those unlicensed games, perhaps none is more celebrated today than Action 52 by Active Enterprises, which might well be the single worst home video game ever foisted upon an unsuspecting public.

Action 52 (NES, 1991): These days, the notion of a 52-in-1 NES cartridge sounds like nothing; after all, we’ve all seen those pirated Famiclone systems in mall kiosks and bazzars for several years now, ever since they became legal in this country, all of which tout 100 or so games built-in. But all of those games are simple graphics and/or gameplay hacks of familiar first-gen NES titles. Action 52, on the other hand, boasted fifty-two original games, at a time when a four-in-one cartridge was considered extravagant (not to mention a dumping ground for a company’s older titles). Even given the rather steep $200 price tag, that averaged out to around $3.85 per game… not bad at all, considering the average price of an NES game in 1991 was about $30-40!

That is, until you actually got it home, popped the cart into your NES, and played the sucker.

That’s about when you discovered the whole cartridge probably wasn’t worth $3.85, let alone $200.

After the admittedly rather impressive title sequence, complete with digitized sound samples (including one of the clearest speech clips ever heard on the NES, imploring you to “Make your selection now!”), you’re presented with a menu of the different game titles available. Right away, you should know what you’re most likely in for, as none of the games has a title that’s even remotely recognizable, and some have bizarre misspellings (for example, note game #50 is called “Ninja Asault”). Still, out of curiosity, you select one that sounds at least somewhat appealing from its title. Let’s choose “Dam Busters,” game #11 on the list, for the sake of illustration:

The title might imply some sort of high-speed aerial bombing run over a well-defended ground target. You couldn’t be more wrong. “Dam Busters” is a bizarre scrolling overhead shooter, where you move a vaguely fox-looking creature inexorably to the right, avoiding various other woodland critters and their projectiles for as long as you can stand it. The graphics are terrible and the sound even worse. Plus, play control is hypersensitive, as seemingly the slightest tap on the D-pad will send your vulpine proxy almost halfway across the length of the screen before you can stop him. We won’t even discuss the shoddy collision detection.

Fortunately, you can quit out of this mess at any time by hitting the Select key to call up the main menu… which is exactly what we will do now. Let’s next try “Illuminator,” game #3:

Hmm… sideview platformer. Not bad when you first look at it. Unfortunately, about two seconds after you start the lights go out on the level, leaving you only able to see the floors and lights. You invariably get killed by invisible enemies about three seconds after that.

“Bubblegum Rosie,” or “Bublgum Rosy” as the menu would have it, is a Super Mario-ish sidescroller in which you try to guide a ponytailed little blonde through an obstacle course. However, note the screenshot, in which our heroine is standing in a spike pit – instant death for any other NES character, but it doesn’t even smudge Rosie’s red dress. There are similar collision-detection problems elsewhere, and jumping control is a total joke; it’s as if the game itself decides when you can jump straight up, or forward.

Now you think we’re talking, right? “Slashers” looks like a good old-fashioned Double Dragon slugfest, and indeed it is… if Double Dragon were programmed by a team of nine-year-olds who just discovered how to make pictures move on their daddy’s old TI-99/4a.

“Megalonia” is a fairly representative specimen of Action 52‘s shooter games. Same old boring background, same old boring enemies, same old fast scrolling that’ll kill you if you blink too much. I’ve played cavern-race games on my old HP48G calculator that were more fun than this.

There are more, but I think you’re getting the point here. There is not one of these games that isn’t horrible in some way – either the play control is wretched, or the hit detection is off, or jumping is impossible, or the game itself is just repetitive and anti-fun. In fact, some won’t even play at all, just giving you a blank screen when you select them!

Of course, no discussion of Action 52 would be complete without mention of the infamous Cheetahmen, stars of the headline game in this odious omnibus…

If ever there were a blueprint for hubris in the gaming world, the Cheetahmen are it. Clearly a ripoff of a certain quartet of pizza-munching shellbacks, Active Enterprises evidently believed the notion of three humanoid, catchphrase-spouting warrior cheetahs, named after figures in Greek mythology, would be the Next Big Thing in the world of kiddom. The Action 52 package included a 12-page comic book detailing the origin of the Cheetahmen, and even touted a full line of Cheetahmen products, including toys, comics, video games (obviously), and even a cartoon!

Even just playing the game, you can tell Active was betting the farm on the Cheetahmen. This is the only game in the cartridge to include a full cinema sequence (above), and one of the very few that looks as if more than ten minutes was spent on its development. You control each of the three Cheetahmen (Aries, Hercules, and Apollo) through two stages apiece, each with his own ability (Aries uses clubs, Hercules has great strength, and Apollo carries a crossbow). Except… once you get into the game, you realize it’s not only as poorly programmed and executed as the previous fifty-one titles, but it also features unwanted and uninspired cameos by enemies you might have faced in those games if you could stand to play them for longer than five minutes! It’s like a bad acid flashback, only worse (because you’re actually sober enough to feel the full brunt of the pain).

Almost uniformly, the quality of the titles in this cartridge is poor. Virtually all of them play like a first-year programming student’s first project, with poorly-drawn graphics, frenetic sound that barely deserves to be called “music,” horrendous play control, and some of the worst bugs ever burned onto a ROM chip. To call this game “amateur night” would be an insult to amateurs the world over. This dreck makes public domain ROM images look good.

And yet, despite all of that… I found myself almost facinated with Action 52. It’s like a case study in exactly how much sucktitude a video game can reek of before it ceases to be a video game and instead becomes an exercise in abstract art. Like the car wreck you just can’t tear your eyes off of (or any movie by Ang Lee… same thing, really), I just couldn’t stop playing the games on this cartridge until I’d gone through all of them. Call it boredom, call it masochism, call it spoiling for the gamer equivalent of the Purple Heart, but there is a certain je ne ce quois about it… as if I somehow knew that, once I suffered through this whole mess, there was nothing I need to fear ever again about any bad video game.

Not E.T. the Extraterrestrial… not Custer’s Revenge… not 2600 Pac-Man… not Deadly Towers… not even the worst Flash game is as utterly Godawful as Action 52. Yet, if you ever do stumble across it in your travels, you have my permission to try it out. Why? Because until you do, you just won’t fully comprehend the depths to which video gaming can truly sink.

Damn you, Tengen. You’re the reason this game was made. If you hadn’t fought Nintendo over the lockout chip none of this would have happened…

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Related posts:

1. Retro-Active: NES Tetris Revisited
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