Neversoft

» see neversoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Three programmers out of Sculptured Software started Neversoft in Woodland Hills on 10 July 1994. Their first game as an independent studio was Apocalypse in 1998, a PlayStation shooter built around a digitized Bruce Willis. It was not a hit, and by the time Activision handed them a skateboarding license in 1999 the studio was running on very little.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater shipped in September 1999 and turned a niche sport into a control scheme. A two-minute run and a combo counter that kept climbing as long as you never touched the ground made it an arcade game with a skateboard on it rather than a simulation, which is the reason it worked on people who had never stood on a board in their lives. Pro Skater 2 arrived in 2000 and is still sitting near the top of every highest-reviewed-game list anyone compiles.

Activision bought the studio outright in October 1999, once the first one landed. Neversoft then put out a Tony Hawk game every year through 2007, nine in total. When the series ran out of road, the same team was moved onto Guitar Hero and shipped that annually too, from Guitar Hero III in 2007 through Warriors of Rock in 2010. By 2012 they were doing Call of Duty support work. Activision announced the merge into Infinity Ward on 3 May 2014 and the Neversoft name was retired on 10 July, exactly twenty years after it was registered.

Skateboarding had no Turkish version of itself to attach to. There were close to no parks, and the sport arrived as imagery rather than as something people around me actually did, so the game had nothing local to sit on top of. What traveled instead was the tracklist. Pro Skater soundtracks turned into circulated lists of song names, and plenty of people here met Goldfinger and the Dead Kennedys as loose mp3 filenames years before they ever saw the game those songs came from.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eyeball ~

The logo was a bloodshot eyeball and it ran before every game the studio made from Apocalypse onward. Studio idents are usually the thing you hold a button down to skip. This one people can still draw from memory, which is a fair measure of how many hours teenagers spent sitting in front of it waiting for a level to load.

Inside the industry the reputation was about finishing. Nine skateboarding games in nine years without a slipped holiday is an unglamorous thing to be known for, and it is precisely what makes a studio valuable to a publisher like Activision, and precisely what makes it interchangeable once that publisher reorganizes.

~ the plastic guitar years ~

Activision acquired Guitar Hero when it bought RedOctane in 2006 and then needed somebody capable of producing it on an annual schedule. Neversoft got the job. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock in 2007 was reported as the first single game to pass a billion dollars in North American retail sales, which is a strange sentence about a product sold with a piece of plastic shaped like a Gibson bolted to the box.

Then the category collapsed. Activision pushed five Guitar Hero products out in 2009 alone, the plastic instruments stopped moving, and in February 2011 the company shut the whole franchise down. Neversoft had been moved off it before that. A studio handed a rescue license in 1999 spent its last years being handed whatever the publisher needed produced next.

~ twenty years to the day ~

The final day was 10 July 2014. At the closing party the staff built an effigy of the eyeball and set it on fire, and Tony Hawk turned up to help, which is a better funeral than most studios get. Everyone still employed carried on in the same building under the Infinity Ward name, working on Call of Duty.

neversoft.com does not resolve any more. What outlived the studio is the handling model: the combo-and-balance grammar of Pro Skater kept showing up in skateboarding games made by other people for the next two decades, and when Vicarious Visions remade the first two games for Activision in 2020, the thing being remade was a physics system three programmers wrote in Woodland Hills after their Bruce Willis game did not work out.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »