Here is the First Retro Review in a hopefully ongoing series of articles.

I have been wanting to run a series on retro gaming for years.  Long before my family had a NES, we had an Atari.  My dad and I would play Combat and the other two player games we had on boring summer afternoons. feeling a bit nostalgic, I picked up the Atari Anthology game compilation for the original xbox about 4 years ago.  My roommate and I spent a few afternoons playing through it and drinking lots of beer.  The special features on that disk lead me to the web site, www.atariage.com/ ,from their I started to relive the glory days of gaming. 

My heart lies with the NES, as that’s is where most of childhood gaming was spent on.  So I knew without a doubt in my mind, that the first retro review had to be a NES game.  Further research lead me to many great NES fan sites, where I have read more reviews for Castlevania and Metroid then I ever will care to mention.  I knew that the first review had to be a NES game, AND  that game had to be pretty rare as to keep it fresh for my readers. 

That lead me to 'Action 52.' I had seen ads for it as a kid, but never saw it in stores as a kid.  The more research I did on this gem, the more I knew it was prefect material for the first Retro Review.

'Action 52' was the first un-licensed multi-cart to get main stream exposure as far as I can tell.  It was made by 'Active Enterprises' a small company that only made enough impact to earn a couple paragraphs worth of info on the web.  Mostly about 'Action 52' I might add.  They marketed 'Action 52' that each week of the year, you would have a new game to play. The game they gave the most attention to, was 'Cheetahmen', a franchise they deemed as a 'Ninja Turtle' killer.  Action Enterprises claimed to be making a Cheetahmen animatronics costume, action figures and cartoon series, with the number one focus on 'quality'.  As far the internet stretches, these never came to light. 

Now you are saying, I never heard of such game, it was never in stores!  Well there is a why, In order for a store to sell Action 52,Nintendo would pretty much say "Ef-You!"  and not allow the store to sell Licensed products.  'Action 52' did not have the little gold sticker on it.

"But what about all the small time places that Nintendo's mighty arm of censorship and megalomania can not reach?"  Active Enterprises wanted you to buy 500 carts at a minimum to sell them.  So the mom and pop stores had to shell out 20,000 bucks in 1991 money.  That’s roughly 30,000 bucks today.  Now for a small business to turn around and sell 20,000 bucks of cartridges from a fly by night company that no one has heard of at the suggest retail price of 200 bucks  a cart would have been quite the risk.  That’s is why you never saw this game as a kid.  You may have been lucky and saw it as rental.

1991, Nintendo was in full swing, the NES has 3 good years left and 136 other games were released that year(many good ones like Tecmo Super Bowl,Skate or Die and G.I. Joe)  the Game Boy was selling like mad and the lucky ones had a SNES late that year.  So 'Action 52' had a lot to prove.  A first time company battling companies that had been releasing games for years requires that you have some ace in the hole that will give you the edge.  52 games sounds like a good edge doesn't it?  What kid would not want 52 games, even if they were from the first years of Nintendo's launch, instead of just one new game.

I have yet to find how long the dev cycle was for this cart, but most good NES were taking about 8 months to 2 years.  Action 52 was in development at the most 3 years, as Active Enterprises started in 89.  Much of this dev time was most likely spent on busting the security chips in the NES.  What? You though the battle on DRM was new?

Without further ado, Action 52, the review.