Neversoft Entertainment

Neversoft Entertainment was an American studio based in Woodland Hills, California. It was founded in July 1994 by Joel Jewett, Mick West and Chris Ward, three employees of Malibu Interactive, the games division of Malibu Comics. Its first contract came from Playmates: a game based on Skeleton Warriors, a toy line and cartoon series the company was about to launch. Work began on the Genesis, Playmates then moved the project to the Sega Saturn, and the studio finished it in late 1995.

The next few years were tough. A Ghost Rider game for Crystal Dynamics was cancelled because of the publisher's money problems, and Big Guns, renamed Exodus, was cancelled in 1997 after many design changes requested by Sony. In January 1998, almost out of cash, Neversoft was hired by Activision to redo Apocalypse, and the Big Guns technology proved a perfect fit. During that project Activision also asked for a skateboarding prototype, which became Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (1999). Activision bought the studio that same year.

Between 1999 and 2007 Neversoft made nine Tony Hawk's games, including the more story-driven Tony Hawk's Underground (2003) and Tony Hawk's Project 8 (2006), its first for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It also made Spider-Man (2000) for PlayStation and the open-world Western action game Gun (2005). In 2006 Activision bought RedOctane and handed Neversoft Guitar Hero: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007) broke several records, and the studio passed Tony Hawk's to Robomodo to concentrate on the new series.

Its last Guitar Hero was Warriors of Rock (2010), which got mixed reviews and sold poorly. Activision then turned it into a support studio for Call of Duty: it made the Chaos Mode for Modern Warfare 3 and the Extinction mode for Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013). In May 2014 it merged with Infinity Ward, and on 10 July that year, twenty years to the day after its founding, it ceased to exist. Its final work was helping on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014).