It's Not That I Hate Furries...

Alright, so I know there are a lot of things that disturb me. For one, how Hasbro continues to miss the point when marketing My Little Pony merchandise. Another is Bratz dolls. But I think when it comes down to it, the most disturbing thing that I can think of is something that never was. Let me explain:

I'm the kind of guy who would pore over deleted scenes and listen to creator commentary to find out about stuff that was intended and then left out. As someone who loves video games a bunch (an amount which some other people might find disturbing) I also find hidden side-areas and glitches and stuff of that nature disturbing. I've wasted too much time on Banjo-Kazooie's "Stop N Swop" to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.

Tonight, I thought I would take the opportunity of the sun being down to sleep. I made the mistake of watching this video from Gametrailers (NSFW: Language) instead. I then followed the link to Cheetahmen Games. Now, my "disturbometer" is going off the chart, meaning that unless I voice my thoughts about this, I'm not sleeping tonight.

Let me first start off by explaining that I'm using disturbed in the lightest sense possible. I'm losing sleep on this, not because I'm horrified, but rather because now I have some thoughts running through my head that I won't be able to quench. That counts as disturbing since it's disturbing my sleep habits and my normal thought processes.

Action 52 was a semi-legal multi-game cartridge released for the Sega Genesis and Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a hastily thrown-together collection of poorly programmed and thought out games in the hopeful attempt to capture a niche market that had, at that time, only been touched by bootleggers. Now, I wouldn't normally lose sleep over something like this. A terrible game was made from scraps of other terrible games like some sort of video game creature from Frankenstein.

What gets me here is: The Cheetahmen.

Good concept meets terrible execution.

 Active Enterprises had big hopes for these three anthropomorphic cheetahs according to Atari HQs site. The creator of the Cheetahmen had big hopes that it would be the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They had "in development" action figures, a cartoon series, and even animatronic robots (ala Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride, not the movie.) for display at marketing events. It's fairly safe to assume that since we find that these "in development" goodies are found in a marketing pamphlet that Active Enterprises was handing out, that by "development" the creator had just thought that it be really cool if they had those things.

The Cheetahmen is a story of sheer optimism. Not just, "gonna take on the world today" optimism that I wake up with any day that I don't have to go to work. It was the over the top enthusiasm that makes all modern consumer's "scam senses" start tingling. It's the kind of enthusiasm you get from a guy in a nice suit and a microphone strapped to his head as the paces up and down a convention center stage telling you all about the newest way that you could get rich that, "the fat-cats in Washington don't want you to know about". It's that kind of optimism that makes you sign up for a series of seminars only to find out three months later that you have no money and "Spike Lawson" isn't a real person but rather a con-artist who just snowballed you.

If you read the pamphlet that Atari HQ has, you see that it's filled to the brim with the stuff. But the scary part is that it wasn't a scam. Or it was a terribly executed scam. What gives me the impression is that it isn't a scam is the fact that, even though they only had funding from a variety of places overseas, Active Enterprises had produced Cheetahmen II in "working" form before Action 52 was ever scheduled to release. The first Cheetahmen was to be packaged as the 52nd game in Action 52. It seems like whoever had the fever-nightmare that inspired Cheetahmen, he was dead set that it was going to be huge. Really huge. Like, remember that scene in the Nutty Professor where Dr. Klump dreams that he's as big as Godzilla? That kind of huge.

And that makes me sad. From what I've been able to dig up (and the scary thing is that there is precious little to find about Active Enterprises) it seems like the man in charge, Vince Perry, had just decided one day that the Koreans had stumbled onto a marketing venture by pirating 52 games into one cartridge and weren't taking advantage of that. So, he came up with the idea that if we could cram 52 games into one cartridge, then why don't we? For an inflated price he was going to sell one game that could give a kid a new game every week for a full year without repeating itself. It really does seem like a good idea. Then he went about it by recruiting just about anyone who was desperate to get into the industry to work for his company which was operating out of a couple of rooms in a sound studio. Most of his employees were college kids. Either he thought that he was going to be tapping into the brightest new game stars before they got picked up by bigger developers, or he was trying to keep costs low by hiring kids who were eager to prove that they could make games.

He then gave them a three month time-frame in which he needed the 52 games made from scratch. He sent some off to Salt Lake City, Utah to learn how to program using the dev kit for the NES. Then they got to work. A lot of ideas got watered down, some were scrapped entirely, and in the end all of the games are either a platformer, a space shooter, or some other genre that shouldn't exist. The weirdest thing was the three month deadline that he gave. If he was an honest man, he plain didn't understand that three months would barely be enough time to make one full game, much less 52. If he was a con artist, then three months was likely when he promised a bunch of investors that the game that was already "well under way" would be released.

Then Vince had his brainchild. The gimmick that would really move all of these games. So what if the rest of the 51 games were kind of "repetitive" or "glitchy" or "wouldn't boot"? They had the Cheetahmen. They were the perfect action heroes. Each had their gimmick. One was the martial arts expert, the other was the heavy guy, and one was the nimble archer. They were named after greek mythology, which was way catchier than the Renaissance painters. And cheetahs are much furrier and cuddlier than turtles ever were. Plus they had the natural cool of being a cheetah. You don't look at a cheetah and think, "that's lame." You see one and kind of envy it. 

Wazzaaaapppp?!!!

Well, considering that you probably haven't even heard of the Cheetahmen before today, you've probably already guessed that Cheetahmen weren't the next Ninja Turtles. It turned out that the next Ninja Turtles would be... well, Ninja Turtles... Active Enterprises up and disappeared leaving nothing but questions and a box full of unsold copies of Cheetahmen II laying in an abandoned warehouse somewhere in Florida.

The one thing I really want to know is if Vince's dreams of making the Cheetahmen into a world-wide franchise were legitimate or if he just decided he'd try to ride the gravy train until someone realized that he didn't have a ticket?

In the case that it was legitimate, then the Cheetahmen fiasco is sad. Everything about it was sad. The execution, the design, the game. Though the music is pretty kickin' for a terrible game. His brainchild died off in some obscure part of history, only to be dug up every once in a while for internet goers to laugh at. Or to be slowly rebooted, if DeviantArt is any indication.

Now I am sad instead of disturbed. I can sleep in peace.