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Action 52 (Wikipedia link) was a game designed in the early 90's.

It's main draw was that it was actually 52 games in one cartridge; the developers suggested that the game sell for $199--hey, that's only four dollars per game! What an amazing deal!

The trouble was...it was one of the biggest pieces of crap ever made for any system, ever. Here is Angry Video Game Nerd's hilarious video on it. He goes through all 52 games, plus the sequels (how on Earth were they able to make sequels???)

Here is an interesting tidbit (bolding mine):

For the NES version, 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.[7] 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; this has been confirmed in an interview with Gonzalez.

Yes, they raised 20 million dollars, only to produce one of the biggest pieces of crap ever.

Seriously, the games were terrible, bizarre, in some cases literally unplayable, made no sense, etc. The "flagship" game, Cheetahmen, was the most well-developed, but was still monumentally terrible.

So what was the point? How could 20 million dollars have been thrown away so easily on such a terrible product? How could they have even released something so bad?

In my next post, I will discuss an alternate version of Action 52. A version that worked, was very successful, and could have led to its own mini-revolution in video gaming.
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