Action 52 - Development

Development

Vince Perri, of Miami, Florida, created Action 52. He showcased the game at the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show. The breakthrough came by accident. "I happened to see my son playing an illegal product made in Taiwan that had 40 games on it. The whole neighborhood went crazy over it", Perri said. "I figured I'd do it legally. It's obvious when you see something like that, you know there's something there."

Several of the songs from the NES version of Action 52 were plagiarized from example tunes included in Activision's The Music Studio for Atari ST. The games with plagiarized music include Fuzz Power, Silver Sword, French Baker, Streemerz, Time Warp Tickers and Ninja Assault. Those songs were composed by Ed Bogas. Additionally, programmer Kevin Horton analyzed the music code of Action 52 and found that it matched a music engine programmed by Sculptured Software. This sound engine also appears in other games by Sculptured Software, including Day Dreamin' Davey, Eliminator Boat Duel, the NES version of Monopoly and Metal Mech.

For the original NES collection, Perri raised $20 million from private backers in Europe, South America and Saudi Arabia. He and Raul Gomila employed several college students (Mario Gonzalez, Javier Perez and Albert Hernandez) to do the game design, music, graphics and programming, which was programmed on an Atari ST, and contracted out technical work to Cronos Engineering, Inc., a Boca Raton company that had done work for IBM. Action 52 may have originally been designed to include 60 games, as evidenced by eight menu templates present in the ROM, as well as many unused tiles. The extra eight games may have been cut due to the large size of the cartridge (two megabytes), and a probable increased production cost.

The Sega Genesis version, released two years later, was developed by FarSight Studios, who had also developed Color a Dinosaur for the NES. Plans for a Super NES version of the cartridge were announced, but Active Enterprises withdrew from the video game industry shortly thereafter, and no copies are known to exist.