Activision has finally pulled the plug on Neversoft Entertainment. The game developer behind the classic Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series and a number of the Guitar Hero titles has been officially shut down, with the team members being absorbed into Infinity Ward, the developer behind the original Call of Duty games.
Neversoft worked along with Infinity Ward on the development of 2013's Call of Duty: Ghosts. Six months after the game's release, Activision announced plans to merge the two studios into a "Super-Studio." This new studio will keep the Infinity Ward branding, thus abandoning the Neversoft name and the eye logo.
To mark the closing of the original Neversoft, employees burned a three-dimensional model of its eye logo that had been part of the studio's building.
Neversoft had been founded in July 1994. The developer gained recognition with the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games. The company made nine Tony Hawk games from 1999 to 2007. The series became popular, not only coinciding with the growth of the following of the actual skater Tony Hawk, but with the rise of Sony's PlayStation brand and videogame consoles. The Tony Hawk series was famous for its fun and complex gameplay, playground-like levels and solid game design.
After 2007's Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, the developer took over the Guitar Hero series for Activision -- Harmonix, the original creators of Guitar Hero 1 and 2 had been bought by MTV and went on to make the Rock Band games. The studio made eight titles for that series, from 2007 to 2010, from Guitar Hero III to 2010's Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. That series was also quite popular, during the heyday of music-based games, which eventually faded in 2009 and 2010.
Neversoft was also known for its Spider-man game for PlayStation, released in 2000 after the success of the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game. The company made a few other standalone titles, including 1995's Skeleton Warriors (based on a cartoon), 1998's Apocalypse (which starred actor Bruce Willis) and 2005's wild west shooter Gun.
The studio was started 20 years ago, having creating games for a variety of consoles and other platforms, from the era of the original PlayStation and the Sega Saturn all the way to the launch of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.
