The creator of
Action 52 was Vince Perri, a businessman from
Miami, Florida, and the owner and founder of Active Enterprises. According to Perri, "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 ... I figured I'd do it legally. It's obvious when you see something like that, you know there's something there". Perri met Mario González at a
recording studio in Miami, where González was working as a
sound engineer. González overheard Perri talking to the studio's owner about his idea for a multicart with 52 original games. González informed Perri that he and his friends, Javier Pérez and Albert Hernández, were into making games; the trio created a
Tetris clone called
Megatris as proof of their abilities. Perri was impressed with the game and, alongside Raúl Gomila, hired them as well as an unknown fourth developer to create the game, with Hernández acting as the main programmer, González composing the music, and González, Pérez, and the fourth developer working on the graphics. The four were flown to
Salt Lake City, Utah, where they were trained for a week on using an NES
development kit The developers, who used an
Atari ST, were given three months to complete
Action 52, leaving little time for playtesting and fixing bugs. González believes that Perri was well-intentioned in his ideas, but made serious errors due to his lack of knowledge of the gaming industry. González also confirms that, in addition to many unused
tiles,
Action 52 has eight extra game templates, because the distributor configured the cartridges to contain 60 games by default. One game from
Action 52 was reflective of its era:
Storm Over the Desert has players drive an American
M1 Abrams tank in a crude top-down depiction of the
Gulf War, in similar vein to the
Bungie-developed
Operation: Desert Storm, which was released a year earlier. Gigantic caricatures of
Saddam Hussein spawn randomly on the map, which the player can either shoot or run over with their tank. In 1993, Perri showcased
Action 52 at the
International Winter Consumer Electronics Show. He claimed to have raised $5 million for the multicart from private backers in Europe and Saudi Arabia. Technical work was contracted out to Cronos Engineering, Inc., a
Boca Raton company who had previously done work for
IBM. The Sega Genesis version of
Action 52 was developed by
FarSight Technologies, under the direction of
Jay Obernolte, using a
Macintosh LC. FarSight's experienced programmers, along with the returning Pérez and Hernández (González did not participate, as he was spending more time with his girlfriend, whom he would eventually marry), developed this version in a one-year timeframe. This version was also playtested, and thus had far fewer glitches than the NES version. Mark Steven Miller and Jason Scher of Nu Romantic Productions composed the music for the Genesis version. Active Enterprises also planned to have FarSight develop an SNES version of
Action 52 and a sports-themed multicart titled
Sports 5, but Active left the gaming industry shortly after. ==Reception==