Action 52 [Model ACT-52]

Retail price: $199

The creator of Action 52 was Vince Perri, a businessman from Miami, Florida and the owner and founder of Active Enterprises. 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". In 1993, he showcased Action 52 at the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show.

Perri raised $20 million from private backers in Europe, South America and Saudi Arabia. He and Raul Gomila employed three college students (Mario Gonzalez, Javier Perez and Albert Hernandez) to do the game design, music, graphics and programming on an Atari ST, with a three-month deadline. Technical work was contracted out to Cronos Engineering, Inc., a Boca Raton company that had done work for IBM. Action 52 has 8 extra game templates, since the distributor had the carts come with 60 games by default, as well as many unused tiles.

Several of the songs from the NES version of Action 52 were plagiarized from example tunes included in Activision's The Music Studio for the Atari ST. The games with plagiarized music include Fuzz Power, Silver Sword, French Baker, Streemerz, Time Warp Tickers and Ninja Assault.

A Yeah! Woo! drum break sample from Rob Base's song 'It Takes Two' is used in the opening sequence.

Active Enterprises advertised a competition in which anyone who could complete level 8 of Ooze would be entered into a prize drawing to win $104,000 ($52,000 cash, and a scholarship of same value). The game was reported to crash on level 2, making this prize impossible to win without the use of emulator or an in-game exploit, rendering the contest a failure.