Neversoft | Code Like It's 198x

A small studio in Los Angeles had been brought in to save someone else’s game. Activision’s Apocalypse, a shooter starring Bruce Willis, had been taken away from the team that started it and handed to Neversoft. When that was done, the studio needed a new project. “Skateboarding – it was either that or bass fishing,” Scott Pease, its director of development, remembered. “We almost did Bass Fishing for THQ.” Instead the team carved up a city level from Apocalypse and put the Bruce Willis character on a skateboard, machine gun and all. That demo became Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

The game made Neversoft. From 1999 to 2006 it released a Tony Hawk’s game every year, and in 2004 Edge credited the series with having “re-established the Activision name”. Then the studio took over Guitar Hero, rode the boom in plastic instruments and the slump that followed, and ended its twenty years inside Call of Duty.

Fast facts

Founded: June 1994, in Los Angeles, by Joel Jewett, Mick West and Chris Ward. Jewett ran it as president until the end.
Owner: Activision, from 1999.
Best known for: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (1999) and its sequels; Guitar Hero from Guitar Hero III (2007).
Closed: merged into Infinity Ward, Activision’s Call of Duty studio, in 2014.

From Ocean to Los Angeles

Neversoft’s founders had worked at Malibu Interactive, a Californian developer that recruited heavily from British studios. One of them was Mick West. He had got his first computer, a ZX81, at 14, learned Z80 on it and on the Spectrum, and written Amiga and Atari ST games for Ocean, among them Darkman and the conversion of Parasol Stars. Ocean paid him a bonus of about £5,000 for finishing Lethal Weapon, “which I promptly used to leave the country”. “A lot of people were leaving Ocean at the time,” he remembered, “and the company in the US that was poaching them (Malibu Interactive) was offering large royalties.”

Jewett, West and the artist Chris Ward set up Neversoft in June 1994. Its first game was Skeleton Warriors, a side-scrolling action game for the Sega Saturn based on a toy line and cartoon, published by Playmates in 1996. In 1997 it was converting Shiny Entertainment’s MDK to the PlayStation; Video Games in Germany interviewed Jewett and West about it as “two of the founding members of Neversoft”.

Apocalypse and the skateboard

Apocalypse was the job that changed the company. Brian Bright, then at Activision, remembered that Activision’s internal team “was not meeting expectations, and the game was pulled and given to a studio called Neversoft. A few of the Activision developers on the internal team joined Neversoft and they began to try and salvage Apocalypse.” Edge later called the game “ill-fated”, but the publisher was impressed with the studio.

The skateboarding demo had to win people over. Free-roaming levels with no finish line were not what players expected, Pease told Edge: “People weren’t used to it: ‘You just do tricks? You just skate around? That’s going to get old.’” Activision looked for a famous name for the box and settled on Tony Hawk. Hawk had played games growing up, and liked the Neversoft demo. The studio faxed him its whole trick list and asked for an expert’s help to make it “legit”. “The whole time we were making the game,” Pease said, “we were thinking if we could sell 250,000 units, we’d make our money back.” Apart from the demo, “the press wasn’t interested, and there were no magazine covers.” So Jewett loaded early versions and “a big stinking TV” into his pick-up truck and drove to skate parks, set up a folding table and let the kids play. Then, while the game was being finished, Hawk landed the first 900 in competition – two and a half turns in the air – at the X Games, and ESPN made it its Play of the Day for two weeks.

The game came out on the PlayStation in 1999; in Britain it was called Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding. Edge gave it seven out of ten, called it “one of those rare success stories” and “easily the finest skateboarding game around”, and compared Hawk to Ayrton Senna – “in terms of pure ability”, it explained, not speed. Edge’s complaint was the hardware: the PlayStation could not draw Neversoft’s levels “without the odd polygon break-up”. About thirteen people made it, Pease said in 2007. Activision bought the studio the same year.

A game a year

Neversoft followed it with a new game every year: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 in 2000, then 3 and 4, Tony Hawk’s Underground in 2003 and its sequel in 2004, American Wasteland in 2005 and Project 8 in 2006. Edge’s 2004 history of Activision explained the bet: when the first game came out, “skateboarding was a marginalised pursuit and Tony Hawk far from a household name. What Neversoft crafted was a new kind of gaming, grafting old-school demands of dexterity and perseverance onto a crowd-pleasingly edgy and urban world.”

The yearly pace wore on the reviews. Edge found Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 “simply more of the same” (seven out of ten again), and thought Underground suggested Neversoft “has run out of ideas for objectives”. By 2007 a Tony Hawk’s team had more than a hundred people, and Neversoft had made other games along the way: Spider-Man for the PlayStation in 2000, which shipped at the same time as Pro Skater 2 and which the studio then had to give up to keep up with the skating games, and Gun, a western, in 2005. When a deadline loomed, the studio worked “hardcore” weeks of 12-hour days from Monday to Thursday rather than weekends, and on Fridays everyone finished at five. It had its own half-pipe.

Guitar Hero

When Activision bought RedOctane, the publisher of Guitar Hero, it owned the name and the guitars but none of Harmonix’s code. It gave the series to Neversoft, where, Bright said, the first game had been “the most popular game played in the studio”. Jewett was, in Bright’s words, “a ‘grab the tiger by the tail’ kind of guy. He saw that Tony Hawk sales were declining after Project 8, and Guitar Hero was the perfect opportunity for the studio.” The lead programmer Paul Robinson had a demo of Guitar Hero running on the Tony Hawk’s engine in three weeks, and the team made Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock in under a year. It came out in 2007, with Slash and Tom Morello in the game. Guitar Hero World Tour (2008) added drums: Bright remembered flying to China, with a special build that showed drum velocities on screen, to fix the first kits at the factory. In three years Neversoft made six Guitar Hero games, and then the market for music games collapsed. See Guitar Hero.

Call of Duty, and the end

With the music games gone, Neversoft moved on to Activision’s biggest series. The whole studio worked on Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), including its Extinction mode, alongside Infinity Ward. The merger of the two studios was revealed in May 2014. In July Neversoft’s staff set fire to the studio’s logo, a skewered eyeball, and Jewett, who had led the studio to its last day, gave each of them a bowie knife engraved with its name. “I semi-retired after Neversoft,” Mick West said later.

Its code had already travelled. For the Game Boy Advance’s launch, Vicarious Visions built Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 on Neversoft’s original PlayStation code, rewriting the low-level parts so that the C++ would run on Nintendo’s handheld.

Sources

Video Games (Germany), August 1997, p. 60: Neversoft converting MDK; Jewett and West as founding members.
Edge issue 77, Autumn 1999, p. 80: review of Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding (PlayStation, £40, seven out of ten).
PlayStation Power issue 57, October 2000, p. 40: “Neversoft file” (founded June 1994; from three to over 25 staff; Jewett, Ward and Chad Findley; Spider-Man and Tony Hawk’s 2).
Edge issue 86, July 2000, p. 61: preview of Spider-Man.
Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002, p. 76: review of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4.
Edge issue 131, Christmas 2003, p. 95: review of Tony Hawk’s Underground.
Edge issue 141, October 2004, p. 35: preview of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2.
Edge issue 143, December 2004, p. 99: “Activisionaries”, on Apocalypse and Tony Hawk’s place in Activision’s history.
Edge issue 157, Christmas 2005, p. 91: review of Gun.
Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006, p. 66: review of Tony Hawk’s Project 8.
Edge issue 178, August 2007, pp. 56–59: studio profile, with Joel Jewett, Scott Pease, Chris Ward, Brian Bright and Chad Findley (the bass-fishing choice; the Apocalypse demo; Tony Hawk; the 250,000 target; the skate-park tour; the 900; Spider-Man; team sizes and working hours).
Wireframe issue 56, October 2021, pp. 39–40: Vicarious Visions’ Game Boy Advance Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, built on Neversoft’s PlayStation code.
Wireframe issue 70, 2023, pp. 72–74: developer profile of Brian Bright (Apocalypse; the first Guitar Hero arriving weeks after American Wasteland; Guitar Hero at Neversoft; Jewett; the China trip; six games in three years; Call of Duty: Ghosts).
“An interview with Mick West”, Codetapper’s Amiga site (web, secondary): his ZX81, his Ocean games, the Lethal Weapon bonus, Malibu Interactive, and his retirement after Neversoft. https://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/mick-west/
“Padded Cell Studios” and “Skeleton Warriors”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): Jewett, West and Ward came from Malibu Interactive; Skeleton Warriors developed by Neversoft for Playmates, 1996. https://segaretro.org/Padded_Cell_Studios, https://segaretro.org/Skeleton_Warriors
Engadget, “Neversoft nevermore, team now fully merged with Infinity Ward”, 11 July 2014 (web, secondary): the Activision purchase in 1999, the 20-year run, the logo, Call of Duty: Ghosts’ Extinction mode. https://www.engadget.com/2014-07-11-neversoft-nevermore-team-now-fully-merged-with-infinity-ward.html
Game Informer, “Neversoft Sets Fire To Iconic Logo As Studio Merges With Infinity Ward”, 11 July 2014 (web, secondary): the merger revealed in May, the knives, Jewett leading the studio to its last day. https://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/07/11/neversoft-sets-fire-to-iconic-logo-as-studio-merges-with-infinity-ward