User:MrD/Cheetahmen

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The Cheetahmen were intended to be the flagship characters for Active Enterprises, a small manufacturer of unlicensed Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges. Based on the then-popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Cheetahmen were three humanoid cheetahs, each wielding a different weapon and/or skill.

The backstory of the Cheetahmen was given in a 12-page comic book included with Action 52, Active's only released NES game. Mad scientist Dr. Morbis kills a mother cheetah while on safari in Africa, then takes her three cubs for his genetic research. Subjected to his experiments, the cubs grow into half-cheetah, half-human creatures. Once they learn of Morbis's evil plans, they turn on him, and he in turn creates an army of half-animal humans (known as "Sub-Species") to stop the Cheetahmen once and for all.

The NES version of the game had an intro sequence that told a story as well, where a boy called the Action Gamemaster is at home playing a video game when a robotic arm reaches through the screen and pulls him into the game. He meets the Cheetahmen, who then run off. The Gamemaster does not appear in the rest of the game, although the manual summary implies that he transforms into the Cheetahmen one after another.

The three Cheetahmen were as follows:

Hercules, named for the Hercules the Greek god, son of Zeus and a mortal woman. He is by nature a pacifist, but will fight with deadly force when the situation demands it. He doesn't use a weapon, but has great physical strength.
Aries, named for the astrological sign Aries that is believed to dictate impulsive behavior (as the group's combat expert he was probably intended to be named after Ares). Aries learned martial arts from movies shown to him by Dr. Morbis. He wields two wooden clubs.
Apollo, named for Apollo, the Greek god. He is the leader of the Cheetahmen, and was the first to question Dr. Morbis's intentions. Like his namesake, Apollo is an archer and a scholar versed in many fields. He uses a crossbow.

The Cheetahmen's enemies included:

Dr. Morbis, an evil geneticist. His ultimate goals are never made clear.
Cygore, Dr. Morbis' assistant with a robotic arm. Sketches of him showed a number of weapon attachments, including a hammer and buzzsaw.
White Rhino
Scavenger, a Sub-Species based on a vulture.
Hyena
Man-Ape (or Ape-Man), allegedly the most powerful of Dr. Morbis' Sub-Species.

The Cheetahmen was the "featured" game on the Action 52 multicart, and there were grandiose plans for a line of merchandise including action figures, t-shirts, a comic book series and even a television cartoon based on the characters. (An advertisement for Cheetahmen action figures, displaying prototype sketches, was included in the aforementioned comic book.) These plans quickly fell through, however, when bad word-of-mouth and scathing reviews of the game began mounting up in earnest. A sequel, Cheetahmen II, was finished but never released.

Among NES fans, the two Cheetahmen games are renowned for being among the all-time worst games ever made for that system. Cheetahmen 2 in particular is buggy, incomplete, and widely regarded as virtually unplayable.

1 Spoofs
2 Boom in Japan
3 See also
4 External links
5 Boom in Japan
6 External links

[edit] Spoofs

There are some media files poking fun of Cheetahmen.

Birth of Evil

This short film mostly consists of a poorly dubbed scene from the 2002 movie Time Changer. The movie does not say who provided the new voices, it only listed the actors portraying the original characters.

Summary: How exactly did Action 52 and the Cheetahmen come about? They are so unplayable, so bizarre, that one wonders if it was just one old insane guy in a barn cranking out games. This short film explores that possibility.

Download Birth of Evil

[edit] Boom in Japan

The Cheetahmen has recently been gaining popularity in Japan since a movie file was posted to "Niko-niko Douga", a YouTube-like website, because of its extraordinarily poor quality and disproportionately cool music. Many users are arranging its BGM for various kinds of music. These postings on the website amounted to more than 100 works within a few days after the first one.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Cheetahmen Corner - A site dedicated to the Cheetahmen, Action 52 and other Active Enterprises information

Cheetahmen II
Developer(s)	Active Enterprises
Publisher(s)	Unpublished
Platform(s)	NES
Release date	Unreleased; found in 1997, copyrighted 1992
Genre(s)	Platform
Mode(s)	Single player
Media	Cartridge

Cheetahmen II was a video game produced by Active Enterprises as a sequel to one of the many games on its multi-game cartridge Action 52. It was not sold commercially at first, but finally went on sale in 1997; all 1,500 known copies of the game were located by Sean Roche in a warehouse in 1997; all were reused Action 52 cartridges with some having a small gold sticker reading "Cheetamen II." Thus the cartridge is very hard to come by. ROM images exist on the Internet.

There are three "Cheetahmen" in the game. They are named after figures from Greek mythology – Ares, Apollo and Hercules.

In Cheetahmen II the player assumes the role of one of the three Cheetahmen, and upon defeating an enemy boss at the end of the second level, they switch to the next Cheetahman for the following two levels as in the Action 52 version. Due to a bug it is impossible to gain access to the levels in which one assumes the role of the cheetahman Ares without altering the ROM image or being the lucky recipient of a glitch that very rarely starts the game on these two levels.

Cheetahmen II is famous for its lack of quality; it is reputed by many in the gaming community to be nearly unplayable. It is rumored to have been produced extremely quickly, with no debugging attempted.

[edit] Boom in Japan

Cheetahmen series (especially Cheetahmen II) has recently been gaining popularity in Japan since a movie file was posted to NicoNico-Douga, a streaming video website, because of its extraordinarily poor quality and disproportionately high quality music. Many users are arranging its BGM for various kinds of music. These postings on the website amounted to more than 100 works within a few days after the first one.