The studio was founded by Joel Jewett, Mick West and Chris Ward in July 1994 and was acquired by Activision in October 1999.

Throughout 1996, the studio grew, and worked on projects with Crystal Dynamics and Sony Computer Entertainment, but due to internal conflicts, they were cancelled.

The last game in the franchise by Neversoft was Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock in 2010, which received mixed reviews and sold poorly.

As a result, it was much easier than at present to set up a game development company, and several groups of people had already left Malibu to strike out on their own.

Joel Jewett, a native of Montana and a CPA, was at the time head of development at the rapidly shrinking Malibu Interactive.

They worked for six months on a game based on Ghost Rider for Crystal Dynamics, which was cancelled due to financial problems with the publisher.

With some excess capacity Neversoft started to develop a game of their own design, initially called Big Guns.

The MDK conversion took far longer than expected, and the Big Guns game (renamed Exodus) went through numerous design changes at the behest of Sony and was cancelled in November 1997.

The technology developed for Big Guns turned out to be ideal for the project, Activision was impressed and Neversoft began work on Apocalypse.

Apocalypse wrapped up in October 1998 and development began in earnest on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

By the end of 1998, the game development was in full swing and Neversoft comprised 16 people: six programmers, five artists, three level designers, one producer and Joel, the company's president.

In 2006, Activision acquired the Guitar Hero series from Harmonix Music Systems, as well as RedOctane, and chose Neversoft as the developer.

Neversoft developed several games in the franchise, breaking several records with Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

[3] In May 2014 it was reported that Neversoft had been merged with Call of Duty creators Infinity Ward to create what was internally referred to as a "super-studio".

[4] Neversoft was officially made defunct on July 10, 2014, 20 years to the day of its founding, with the remaining employees attending a burning of a sculpture of the skewered eyeball from their logo that has been part of their offices before.