Remembering Neversoft

Okay time for some crazy facts... Tony Hawk's Pro Skater came out 15 years ago on the original PlayStation and the Nokia N-Gage. I'll let that either god I'm old or wtf is a N-Gage settle in for a second.
 
The news came out last week that Neversoft would be dissolved into Infinity Ward-- or as Activision put it: they are retiring the Neversoft name. Also retiring was the last of the studio's founders, Joel Jewett, who will be leaving the games industry. For such an influential studio to just go poof is a sad moment in gaming, so I'd like to look back and celebrate their life as a studio... as opposed to their slow death at the hands of their publisher.
 
Now obviously Neversoft will be remembered for the Tony Hawk games, but I would like to talk about some of their other games first. Before they ever teamed up with Tony, their first original game actually starred Bruce Willis-- the little known third person shooter Apocalypse. The game is pretty much a joke by today's standards for a third person shooter... but it had some interesting ideas for the time- like being a twinstick shooter that used the right analog to fire your weapon in any direction. Also using licensed music and having an A-list actor star as the main character of your game was pretty uncommon in 1998. The engine built for Apocalypse would be the same engine Tony Hawk was built on.
 

 
In the year 2000 it felt like anything was possible... the new millennium was upon us and the Y2K bug hadn't caused our microwaves to launch a nuclear missile strike. It was that optimistic future view that lead Neversoft to do the unthinkable- make a good Spider-Man game! To be fair, Sega did make both an amazing Genesis and Arcade Spider-Man game in the early 90's... but that was easily lost under a mountain of crap comic book games.
 
In this new age of 64-bit games and CD-Rom technology, there was the promise of swinging around a 3D New York as Spidey. Using 3D graphics also opened up things like being able to unlock alternative costumes from Spider-Man's diverse wardrobe history and CD-Rom technology allowed for a fully voiced character that actually had snappy dialogue that matched the iconic webslinger. This would be the only Spider-Man game made by Neversoft, but it opened the door for Activision to pump out a steady stream of Spider-Man games even up until today... for better or for worse (mostly worse). At least we could skate as Spider-Man in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2.
 

 
There was only one game created by Neversoft that was entirely original without the use of a celebrity or license... and that game was simply called Gun. It took place in a setting often not seen in video games- 1880's wild west. The game would have perhaps been more memorable if it had not been for Rockstar releasing Red Dead Revolver the year before... and the fact that no sequels to the game ever surfaced (although they were rumored to be in development).
 
Gun did have the honor of being one of the launch titles for the Xbox 360... but was overshadowed by other Activision games like Call of Duty 2. What set Gun apart from Red Dead Revolver was the amount of things you could do... it was an open world game where you could do things like cattle herding and poker tournaments if you didn't feel like shooting people- very much like Red Dead Redemption that came out 5 years later. Red Dead Redemption was really one of the best games of the last generation, so it is no wonder why Gun faded into obscurity.
 

 
Of course the real reason to pick up a game with that iconic skewered eyeball logo was if you wanted a fun skateboarding game. Much like Spider-Man there had been a few skateboarding games like Skate or Die! that had done a decent job... but Neversoft blew away everyone's expectations of what that kind of game could be.
 
What THPS got right was the attitude and culture that went along with skateboarding. The X Games had only been around for a couple years, and Tony Hawk certainly was not a household name. Despite having pro skater in the title you were not skating on tracks in front of an audience... many levels were parks and areas where skaters typically went. There were also a slew of secrets in the game, like an unlockable police officer, Officer Dick, and each pro skater also had some hidden special moves. There was also a punk rock soundtrack that was at a time when licensed music was a rarity... and especially from that genre.
 

 
They found this great area where gravity and physics felt very real, but you could also do insane tricks that would be humanly impossible. THPS grew into a blockbuster franchise, and each sequel was better than the last with more characters, more tricks, more music... there was never another skateboarding game that could even come close. Unfortunately Activision ran the series into the ground... or underground with the open world Tony Hawk's Underground series. During the height of the plastic instrument music game phase they thought it was a good idea to release Tony Hawk games with a skateboard peripheral... basically killing off the Tony Hawk franchise with some terrible games (although those titles were not made by Neversoft).
 
The plastic instrument music game phase was pretty much what did in Neversoft though... they were assigned to the Guitar Hero series after Harmonix left Activision to do Rockband. It felt very much like Neversoft was in the shadow of Harmonix in the same way any other skateboarding game was in the shadow of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Plastic instrument music games slowly died out and Neversoft stepped in to help develop the multiplayer on Call of Duty: Ghosts.
 
Call of Duty is where the ghost of Neversoft will live on... I guess if you are going to be a soulless sequel factory, it might as well be on a series that makes the most money.