Neversoft

Neversoft Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Woodland Hills, California. The studio was founded by Joel Jewett, Mick West and Chris Ward in July 1994 and was acquired by Activision in October 1999. Initially, the studio worked with Playmates Toys, where they worked on the game Skeleton Warriors, which was based on a animated television series of the same name. Throughout 1996, the studio grew, and worked on projects with Crystal Dynamics and Sony Computer Entertainment, but due to internal conflicts, they were cancelled. After a meeting with Activision in 1998, the publisher agreed to enter into a deal with the studio to create Apocalypse, which used the game engine created by Neversoft for one of the cancelled Sony projects. During the game's development, Activision asked the studio to work on a prototype for a skateboarding game, and after an impressed reaction from Activision to the prototype, the publisher released the game as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999 to critical acclaim and acquired Neversoft at the end of that year. Neversoft developed a Spider-Man game for the PlayStation the following year, along with six Tony Hawk's games over the next several years. In 2004, the company split into two teams to work on two games at once, the upcoming Tony Hawk's and a new intellectual property, the western action-adventure game Gun. After Activision's acquisition of Guitar Hero in 2006, Neversoft continued the franchise, working on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, which was released in 2007 to similar acclaim to previous games in the franchise. With the game's success, Neversoft focused on developing new Guitar Hero games, passing development of new Tony Hawk's to Robomodo. The last game in the franchise by Neversoft was Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock in 2010, which received mixed reviews and sold poorly. Due to this, Activision reduced Neversoft to a support studio for future Call of Duty games.