10 Most Infamous Unreleased Gaming Consoles

9. Active Enterprises' Action GameMaster

Active Enterprises

In 1991, a small company named Active Enterprises released an unlicensed game cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System (it hit the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1993), the infamous Action 52, a collection of 52 different games for the low, low price of just... $199?!?!?!

Yes, the idea was that with 52 games in one cartridge, you were paying less than $4 per game, or about the going rate to rent a game at the time. The games were uniformly terrible, and many had game-breaking glitches, some even crashing at the title screen. The centerpiece was 'The Cheetahmen', Active Enterprises' attempt at creating franchise characters. As you may have noticed from the lack of Cheetahman titles propping up the Switch, it didn't really work.

With limited distribution and no official Nintendo or Sega license, it was a flop, but Active Enterprises was thinking big. They also announced an upcoming portable system, the Action GameMaster. Not only would it have a cartridge slot for their own games, like Cheetahmen III (the second one came out as a standalone NES title), but it would have adaptors for NES, SNES, and Genesis/Mega Drive cartridges, as well as a CD drive for Sega CD games. How they expected to do this, only they know, but obviously it never happened and, hopefully nobody invested money in this company.

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Formerly the site manager of Cageside Seats and the WWE Team Leader at Bleacher Report, David Bixenspan has been writing professionally about WWE, UFC, and other pop culture since 2009. He's currently WhatCulture's U.S. Editor and also serves as the lead writer of Figure Four Weekly and a monthly contributor to Fighting Spirit Magazine.