7 Video Game Developers KILLED After Corporate Takeovers

The year is 1999. Goldfinger’s ‘Superman’ is playing as you guide a virtual skateboarder down a ramp and into a warehouse that is filled with ramps and rails rather than the crates and pallets that would typically be associated with such a location. You’ve had your first exposure to Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding, a game that would go stratospheric and bring the skating subculture into the mainstream.

Tony Hawk’s was the creation of Neversoft, who had first been engaged by Activision to work on the now long-forgotten Apocalypse, which featured the voice and likeness of Bruce Willis.

Aside from a well-received Spider-Man game for the original PlayStation and the Western-themed Gun for PS2, the skateboarding franchise was the sole focus of the studio for the next several years. Iterations 2 through 4 were fantastically received, even as the latter moved away from the 2-minute arcade-style gameplay in favour of something more open-ended.

Tony Hawk’s Underground was the series last major highpoint and it had started to go downhill (no pun intended) by the time Neversoft were shifted away from skateboards and onto guitars after Activision’s aforementioned takeover of RedOctane.

After they developed seven Guitar Hero games in four years during the height of the peripheral-based music game bubble, Neversoft were left in limbo when it burst and ultimately ended in 2014, their passing marked by a ceremonial burning of their iconic eyeball logo 20 years after its creation.