It all started on a pleasant summer afternoon, making my standard trips into the video game stores I obtained a cartridge of Action 52. Soon after I returned to my home I began playing the game, I realized how horrible it truly was, but for some reason I kept playing... months later, I was still playing... and now I was searching for the elusive Active Enterprises.

All information that was readily available to the public was from various NES sites, most filled with little information or non-information that was not too helpful in my quest to locate the company. It was at this point that I began contacting TRM of the popular NES site "The Warp Zone", he was quite helpful and assisted in my search by providing any information that he had found.

However, that information did not lead to Active as I had hoped it would, so I was required to do some more searching... and search I did, this searching led me to FarSight Studios, the company who created the Genesis version of Action 52. After sending an e-mail to the company it was quickly responded to by the first person I located in my search.

Jay Obernolte

Obernolte contacted me back within several minutes of my initial e-mail giving me a phone number to call him at his work number. At the time this phone call could not be made for various reasons, one of which being that I had no idea what his connection was to Active or even if he worked on the game. I continued playing the e-mail game, throwing an excuse out as to why I could not phone him led to yet another e-mail saying that he was fine with answering any questions I might ask through e-mail. I asked a few short questions and was quickly given the response of "WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THIS?", yes, in all capital letters. I explained my position and was anxious to receive another e-mail response from Mr. Obernolte but I received nothing, for several months following I would continue to send him a brief weekly e-mail hoping for a response but it never came. During this period I continued my work.

During this period of time I continued to investigate FarSight Studios, it was quite strange to see such a strange defensive response from a company that was thought to have no connection to Active Enterprises other than working on one game and to have had perfectly clean business practices... searching Google's usenet archives I came across a post from the Summer of 1993 from the second person I located in my search.

Chris Ziomkowski In his posting Ziomkowski stated that he knew "the guy" working on Action 52 for the Sega Genesis and claimed that he had played it and knew it was quality work. This posting made me fairly suspicious of Ziomkowski and I did more research on him, turning up that he in fact had worked for FarSight Studios and did during this period of time. I traced him down to a current e-mail address and sent a message... no response, after sending another message to him I received a response stating that "I am not the Chris Ziomkowski that posted this message to usenet in the summer of 1993, however I do know him. WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THIS?"... yes, he expected me to believe that he just happened to have a friend sharing the same exact and quite rare name, and also tossed in the old "WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THIS" for good measure. I sent him a response and as with Jay Obernolte it apparently indicated that I "knew too much" and I never received a response. I continued mailing the response to him weekly in hopes of receiving some information but never received anything.

With FarSight Studios electing to keep their lips tightly sealed I decided to move in a different direction. Knowing that the United States Government had a freely available patent and trademark server I decided to check for the things that Active claimed to have trademarked. What I found was that "Action 52" and "Cheetahmen" were registered trademarks of Active Enterprises. With this information I was able to locate a warehouse address in Nassau, Bahamas [900 Warehouse (Newington)] this is where they were based shortly before they disappeared off the face of the earth, according to the U.S. Patent/Trademark office it was their address on 12/21/1993. From here I was ready to search for this warehouse, after a brief search I found that it is apparently currently used by Society Capital Management Limited and any connection it may have had to Active Enterprises is now gone...

Nearly ready to give up, I stumbled onto a nice little clue. That being the following wording on a page:

"Active Enterprises LTD :: voice technologies

Description: Active Enterprises LTD. is an international company based in Nassau Bahamas. We began developing innovative projects in 1991 when we released the worlds first multigame cartrage for the nintendo gaming system. Today we provide high-quality, offshore software development services and Web design solutions at excellent rates. We specialize in voice controlled applications that feature the latest in both speech recognition and text to speech technologies. Active Enterprises helps companies around the world to leverage the power of the Internet by placing highly qualified software programming specialists, project managers, and analysts at their fingertips."

And guess what? That was as of 2001. Normally people have said that "Active went bankrupt and disappeared...", people thought that they had put themselves out of business after releasing Action 52 for the Genesis and the NES, that was not the case at all. Active Enterprises is still kicking...

So... why weren't there other games released? Why the sudden change? Simple, FarSight Studios signed an exclusive contract with Sega in 1994 to work on their NFL Football series for the next couple of years. FarSight knew how to program on the SNES and the Genesis, Active Enterprises didn't, the NES was dead by early 1994 [when Cheetahmen II would have been released] and thus Active decided to forget the video game market and head somewhere else.

Back to the search... the link to their website was down so it was my responsibility to locate the site. I searched and searched hoping to finally locate something but I couldn't, until I met my final search result... identifying not only the website, but a name, an address, and a fax number to go with it. So what did I find?

Drumroll please...

"Active Enterprises, LTD","P.O. Box N-8978","Nassau, New Providence n/a - BS","","","activenterprises.com", "Perri, Vince","vince@ACTIVENTERPRISES.com","305-559-2900 305-554-9388 305","","Perri, Vince","vince@ACTIVENTERPRISES.com", "305-559-2900 305-554-9388",""

What does that mean?

Company Name: Active Enterprises LTD
Address: P.O. Box N-8978, Nassau, New Providence, Bahamas
Website: ActivEnterprises.com
Name: Vince Perri
E-Mail: Vince@ActivEnterprises.com
Phone: 305-559-2900
Fax: 305-554-9388

Then for some reason the phone and fax information repeats itself... don't ask me why. So...

Vince Perri

The idea now was to locate Mr. Perri. I quickly found that the phone number and fax information was no longer pointing to Active Enterprises. Thus I attempted to use the great resource that is google's usenet archives and see if Mr. Perri had ever posted. Did I find messages he had posted? Yes, yes I did. Here is the first:

How do I know it's him? Simple, the e-mail address active@icanet.net not only says "Active" in it, but Icanect was a dial-up server in Miami, Florida at the time of this posting. Also notice the standard Active business plan of "Look how cheap this is!" when he advertises the CDRs. Also note that Mr. Perri stated that he used XT computers, that dates him back far prior to the creation of Active Enterprises LTD. and means that there is no question that he could have had the knowledge required to create games.

He also posted once more on 12/11/1996 in efforts of joining a Warez mailing list.

Another interesting note that I find hilarious considering it's Active Enterprises related... is that several users claimed to be receiving spam e-mails regarding CDRs from active@icanect.net one user even pasted the e-mail which goes as following:

It's also interesting to note that e-mail to the icanect.net address is not bounced nor is e-mail to the vince@activenterprises.com address. E-mail to both of these addresses has gone completely unanswered.

And essentially... that's the story to date, I don't know what else to state other than I hope Mr. Perri will choose to e-mail me at activefaq@blazemail.com if he sees this as I really want to talk to him.

An interesting addition to this story is that I have been receiving strange instant messages stating "Stop bothering Vinnie". It's hard to say whether that is Active Enterprises related or simply a coincidence from someone trying to freak me out for whatever reason. There is a Vinnie Perri listed in the Florida phone listings but this Mr. Perri lives several hours away from Miami where the Vince Perri I am looking for appears to be based.

With that said, if you have any information on Active Enterprises LTD. not featured here, worked at Active Enterprises, worked or work at FarSight Studios and wish to speak to me about Action 52, or just give feedback on this contact me at activefaq@blazemail.com