10 Crazy Unlicensed Video Games You’ve Never Heard Of

8. Action 52 (Nintendo Entertainment System & Sega Genesis)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWXOQD-VAmY One popular way to pirate existing games was the multicart. Multiple existing licensed NES games would be crammed into a single cartridge with crude menus and sometimes hacked versions of the games as fake sequels. There are too many of these to count, with a wide variety made by different small developers all over the world. Active Enterprises put out the best known NES multicart, but they weren't interested in piracy. In fact, while they obviously weren't a licensed Nintendo publisher since one of their titles made this list, they had grand visions of taking over not only the video game world, but TV as well. The collection was Action 52, a cartridge filled with 52 honest to goodness original games built in-house, centered around a title featuring their mascots, The Cheetahmen, who they were planning on featuring in a cartoon series. With these delusions of grandeur, you'd think that they'd try to increase awareness by pricing the game in line with the average NES title and emphasizing the value. Instead, it cost TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. They still got to claim the games were less than $4 each, but the games, programmed by a handful of college students, were hideously bad, with several crashing, including two that wouldn't get past the title screen. Being a $200 game that was mostly available through mail-order ads, it didn't sell well and is a prized item among NES collectors. The Cheetahmen cartoon never happened, and while there was a Cheetahmen game sequel, it wasn't actually sold anywhere until someone found 1,500 cartridges (which were reused Action 52 cartridges, no less) in a warehouse years after it was finished. It makes you wonder just how many copies of Action 52 were sold. One would think it was incredibly hard to get parents to buy it.