According to Action 52, the unlicensed 1992 cartridge crammed 52 original games onto one Nintendo chip and sold for US$199, becoming "one of the worst video games of all time." Businessman Vince Perri founded Active Enterprises after watching his son play a Taiwanese 40-game bootleg: "I figured I'd do it legally."
The developers were flown to Salt Lake City, trained for a week, and "given three months to complete Action 52, leaving little time for playtesting and fixing bugs." Some games "freeze or crash," and Active advertised a $104,000 contest for anyone who could beat Level 6 of a game called Ooze. But "Ooze was reported to consistently crash on Level 2; therefore, it was impossible to qualify for the contest without using an emulator."
A Rock Paper Shotgun retrospective called the games "creatively bankrupt rush jobs," with the best entries being "minigames which functioned." The cartridge's flagship, The Cheetahmen, was intended to launch a franchise that would rival the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
