CheetahMen II

Background

Active Enterprises only ever made two games. The first was called Action 52, and consisted of 52 different games on a single cartridge. The second is CheetahMen II which is the sequel to one of the games included in Action 52. The cartridges for CheetahMen II were leftover from Action 52 and still have the Action 52 labels on them. A small gold Cheetamen II label (with the typo!) was added to the back of the cartridge to differentiate them. (Supposedly there may also be some CheetahMen II cartridges that are missing the gold label.)

Crawling With Bugs

With the game never having been completed, it is swimming with bugs. Many ROM hacked or patched versions of the game can be found across the web. It is so buggy many a people have made money correcting the many flaws. While the game is infamous for being one of the worst games ever made and extremely difficult -- a large amount of this is due to the amount of glitched gameplay and bugs that can be found within.

Eye-popping Price Tag

Due to the nature of its discovery and the scarce amount of copies, the game demands an incredible sum. As of May 21st, 2023, on eBay the average price across 6 available copies was $5,160 USD.

Inaccessible/Unused Levels

Due to a bug on level 4, the game cannot be progressed further to levels 5 or 6 without ROM hacking or through an exploit using the physical cartridge and excessive powering on and off. The two unseen levels are nearly identical to levels 2 and 3 of the original Cheetahmen from the Action 52 cartridge. Ironic that the game with "Lost Levels" in the title would end up having unused/inaccessible levels in the ROM.

Kickstarter

A Kickstarter was launched to fund a patched version of the game that would be sold on physical NES cartridges. It was a success having raised $94,270 out of the $65,000 goal (all prices in USD and as of May 5th, 2023). Successful or not, many have speculated calling it a money grab by the fund creator, Greg Pabich.

Unfinished

CheetahMen II was not completed and was never officially released. All copies of the game that exist are from a discovery back in 1996 where 1,500 copies were found within a warehouse in Florida. From there, the games eventually made their way onto the market.