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Sitio web. Neversoft.com. [ editar datos en Wikidata] Neversoft o Neversoft Entertainment fue una desarrolladora de videojuegos fundada en 1994 en California, por Joel Jewett, Mick West y Chris Ward. Fue adquirida en 1999 por Activision .
- Joel Jewett, Mick West, Christopher Ward
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.
- July 1994; 29 years ago
- Woodland Hills, California, US
- 120 (2014)
Antigua empresa desarrolladora de videojuegos / De Wikipedia, la enciclopedia encyclopedia. Neversoft o Neversoft Entertainment fue una desarrolladora de videojuegos fundada en 1994 en California, por Joel Jewett, Mick West y Chris Ward. Fue adquirida en 1999 por Activision.
- On the 20th anniversary of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Hawk and the former heads of Neversoft open up on its legacy.
- “My Life Seemed like it Had Some Potential Again”
- The Crazy Old Days
- Work Hard, Play Harder
- Skating By
- The Impact
By Joseph Knoop
Updated: Aug 13, 2020 3:41 pm
Posted: Aug 30, 2019 7:22 pm
The skateboarding industry, much like the video game industry, is a massive web of marketing, of community, and of money – all with a deep well of young men and women’s aspirations fueling it along. They’re both massively popular industries now – the International Olympics Committee has finally acknowledged skateboarding’s cultural relevance – but it’s funny to think that, less than a decade apart, both experienced massive turmoil. The great video game crash of 1983, and the early ’90s crackdown on street skating threatened their lifeblood.
Through competitive skating, Hawk himself had become a sort of teenaged wunderkind in the late ’80s. By the time he was 17 years old, Hawk’s annual salary surpassed that of his high school teachers, and he purchased his own condo before graduating. $20,000 royalty checks weren’t unheard of for Hawk by 1987, and the competition championships were plentiful, spurring more and more sponsorship deals.
“[Skateboarding] wasn't something that I thought I could make a career out of, initially,” Hawk says.
But, in the early ’90s, things came to a screeching halt.
By the time Hawk was 22 years old, his salary was being cut in half every year, the competition was drying up, and those fewer events saw their prize pools shrink. He had committed to two mortgages and had just started a family. For two years, Hawk pulled back on all financial burdens, eating ramen and peanut butter jelly sandwiches, refinancing his house and selling it at a loss.
By the time Hawk was 22 years old, his salary was being cut in half every year.
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Neversoft co-founder and president Joel Jewett wants you to know that game development back in the ’90s was a completely different world. When you ask a former Neversoft employee what day-to-day life in the studio was like, including the former president, you almost always get an amused, slightly exasperated sigh, and then a few comments about the “crazy old days.”
The studio’s legacy has long been infamous, but it took more than a frat house to build Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The way Joel Jewett tells it, half of the industry practices we take for granted these days were formed in or around Neversoft and the turn of the century.
“You would do your work, and then you would eject a little floppy disk and go over to the other room and merge your work with one of the other team member's work on their PC, so there was no network,” Jewett says. “There was barely a fledgling internet out there that we'd heard about.”
Jewett, now retired, mentions a recent Neversoft reunion party. Even five years after the studio finally shut down by burning their infamous pierced eyeball logo, there’s still a deep sense of family and camaraderie running through its former workers. Jewett’s stewardship, along with the freewheeling but intense culture of the studio, most certainly saw to that.
Neversoft was born out of the ashes of Malibu Interactive, formerly Acme Interactive. By the time Malibu Comics had acquired Acme, things were “disintegrating,” and multiple employees were beginning to form their own individual studios. Jewett saw an opportunity and asked Malibu level artist Chris Ward and Malibu programmer Mick West to help him start a new company.
The pair agreed, and Neversoft was formally born. Jewett kicked things off by buying a single, old Compaq PC for West, who would initially serve as the company’s programmer. On top of it all, Jewett’s first child was born within a month of the company’s founding. In hindsight, he says that at least it helps him keep track of how long he’s been doing this kind of work.
For Jewett, making something like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was never once considered an obligation imposed upon Neversoft.
“Even when we started making it, we considered it to be the opportunity of a lifetime, because it's basically making original content on a certain level, you know?” Jewett says.
According to Jewett, one of the primary reasons Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater managed to succeed as quickly as it did was because every employee was encouraged to embed themselves in skating culture. Jewett himself had been riding skateboards since the early days of longboards in the ’70s, and Pease had grown up on it a number of years later. As for the rest of Neversoft? “Do you skate?” was a question quickly added to the hiring process.
Things didn’t stop there. Jewett threw $3,000 of Neversoft’s budget (still a huge investment for the modest studio) towards building a skateboarding ramp outside the studio. Company outings were regular trips to Skate Street in Ventura, or just at Jewett’s own house.
“As we interviewed people, they would have to be awesome at their job to get hired, if they couldn't skate,” Jewett says. “And we really tried to get them to be awesome at their job and skate.”
The wild party mindset of Neversoft extended to antics that the games industry might look upon questioningly these days. West remembers betting a coworker a few hundred dollars that he could learn to kickflip before him.
While making Pro Skater was an exciting prospect for the team, some will freely admit they had no real idea of what they were getting into. The prospect of designing a physics system, a trick system, and balancing it all between accessible fun and the competitive side to the sport proved daunting.
Like all great conceptualization processes, it started with cramming everybody into a room with a whiteboard and some markers.
“I stood up there and I just drew a picture of a school building and some steps and some half-pipes, just very very simple,” West says. “And I said ‘What should the game be? What do we do in the game? What is fun to do?’ It was in those two days that we did this, the entire company just standing in front of or sitting in front of the whiteboard in the conference table, getting ideas like the S-K-A-T-E letters.”
Of course, even if many of the folks at Neversoft were solid skaters, they still weren’t on the level of growing legends like Hawk, Burnquist, or Chad Muska. The only way to really get a feel for how to program and animate a kickflip was to learn from the pros.
“In the first game we pretty much ate up all the basic skateboarding tricks,” Pease says. “Even just to flesh out the eight directions on square and circle. And we were learning as we went too. And not only just Tony but all the skaters, the pro skaters. I mean the guys would come in and visit Neversoft and hang out with us. And that was like my go-to skateboarding school moment. You know just even just hearing those guys talk about that stuff in that detail, I think impacted everybody on the team. Like you just you get a real respect for what they do and like how hard it is.”
And then Tony Hawk threw a spanner in the works: during the 1999 X-Games, he performed the very first 900. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was due to launch only about two months later.
20 years later, the Neversoft family and Hawk are eager to reflect. Maybe it’s because of the franchise’s huge success, right up until Neversoft’s departure to work on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock in 2007. Maybe it’s because the effects of the series can be felt not only in the video game industry but in the sport of skateboarding.
For Tony Hawk, he sees it in the kids learning to skate who have never even heard of him before.
“Some of the top pros literally have told me, ‘I started skating when I played the game because I wanted to learn these tricks.’ But, as we're coming into... now, we're 20 years on, there's a whole new crop of kids that are skating, that only know me because their parents knew who I was,” Hawk says. “Or they know me because they see me on some kids show. A lot of the reason that I'm still invited to do those kids shows is because of the video games. So, there's just so many levels to it. And I attribute my ongoing success to, beyond just still skating at my age and still being out there working as much as ever, I attribute just the name recognition alone to that video game series.”
Ever the consummate businessman, Hawk is mindful of just how many doors were opened to him as a result of the huge boost in name recognition he received.
“To me, it's all unreal,” Hawk says. “I still am shocked how far skating's reach has come. I get invited to do speaking gigs now. That's not something I'd ever imagined doing, going to do motivational speeches or a speech, telling my story to a group of people because it just didn't seem that interesting. No one was interested in it when I was a kid. And the idea that I can get in front of a group of people that are genuinely engaged and talk about kickflips, and they know what I'm talking about, is absurd to me. And a lot of them know what a kickflip is because of THPS.”
“To me, it's all unreal,” Hawk says. “I still am shocked how far skating's reach has come.
Neversoft is experienced in mobile game publishing and has so far released more than ten products worldwide on major platforms such as "Cherry Tale" and "What in Hell is Bad". Its publishing team assists in product QA testing, platform integration communication, and project management.
Guitar Hero World Tour is a 2008 rhythm game developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. It is the fourth main installment and the sixth overall installment in the Guitar Hero series. The game was launched in North America in October 2008 for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360 consoles, and a month later for ...
Founded. July 1994. Defunct. July 10th, 2014. Key people. Joel Jewett. Industry. Video games. Products. Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013) Parent. Activision. Website. http://www.neversoft.com/ Neversoft was an American video game developer, founded in 1994 by Joel Jewett, Mick West and Chris Ward and acquired by Activision in 1999.
