The Cheetahmen

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The Cheetahmen is a video game series from Active Enterprises that stars three friendly cheetahs with human traits: Aries, Apollo, and Hercules. It first appeared in 1991 on the NES as part of the Action 52 multi-game cartridge. The games are famous (or infamous) for very poor quality, and many people consider them among the worst games ever made. The catchy main theme from The Cheetahmen was later reused as overworld music in the parody game Cat Mario.

The original NES game, sometimes shown as “Cheetah Men,” “Cheetahmen,” “Cheetamen,” or “The Cheetahmen,” splits into six levels—two for each of the three Cheetahmen. Each level ends with a boss battle, and many enemies come from other Action 52 games (including a Saddam Hussein parody). The game’s framing device features a boy called the Action Gamemaster who’s pulled into his TV to meet the Cheetahmen, though he isn’t referenced in future titles.

Backstory for the Cheetahmen appears in a comic included with the Action 52 cartridge. A mad scientist named Dr. Morbis kills a mother cheetah on a safari and steals her cubs, turning them into human-cheetah hybrids. The hybrids gain awareness and oppose Morbis, who then creates a varied army of other hybrids to stop them. The Genesis version of the game follows a similar idea but has the Cheetahmen trying to rescue cheetah cubs from Morbis.

Cheetahmen II, never officially released in its time, had six playable levels split among the three Cheetahmen. A bug sometimes made certain levels impossible to reach. In 2011, a patch by romhacking.net member PacoChan fixed many issues, giving the game a more playable version. Greg Pabich later released a version called Cheetahmen II: The Lost Levels after a Kickstarter funded by fans in 2012; this project aimed to fix the game’s glitches and ended with some controversy over the campaign.

Cheetahmen III was planned for a handheld system called the Action Gamemaster, announced in 1994. The device was meant to be a large, multi-function handheld that could play NES, Genesis, and SNES games, plus CD-ROMs, with features like a color LCD, CD player, TV tuner, and car charger. Neither the game nor the console was released, and both are now considered vaporware; the company apparently closed around the same time.

In spirit, the Cheetahmen franchise was meant to be a bold, TMNT-like idea—mutated animal heroes named after Greek gods—though it became infamous more for its poor quality and unusual history than for its gameplay.