I was curious and found a good period article — by Brian Moriarty, later of Infocom and LucasArts fame — on the Action! language: https://x868k.com/retro/action/article/?p=analog&i=n16p0...

Cool thing about action! Was you could write a game in a high level language without resorting to a heavy lift of assembler. Assembler for an 12 year old like me was ans unforgiving as JavaScript but for different reasons.