of Malibu Interactive (previously Acme Interactive), a division of Malibu Comics based in Westlake Village, California. At that time, the primary platforms were the home gaming consoles, the Genesis/Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Games for these systems could be developed by small teams, anywhere from two to ten developers. 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. He teamed up with Mick West, a game programmer, who had just completed working on BattleTech: A Game of Armored Combat for the Genesis, and Chris Ward, a video game artist. In July 1994, Neversoft was formed. They initially found work for Playmates Interactive, a then-division of Playmates Toys who were about to release a line of toys called Skeleton Warriors and wanted a video game to go along with the toys and the cartoon series. Neversoft began work on the game design and moved into offices in Woodland Hills, California. Neversoft worked on the Genesis version for five months. Over that time they hired another artist and a level designer. In December 1994, Playmates cancelled the game. They were not unhappy with the progress, but had decided that they needed to develop the game for the Sega Saturn. 1995 was spent developing Skeleton Warriors for the Sega Saturn. Over the course of 1995, Neversoft grew rapidly by hiring three programmers, five artists, a level designer, a tester and an office administrator. Skeleton Warriors was finished in time for the 1995 holiday season and Neversoft began looking for other work while they ported Skeleton Warriors to the PlayStation in 1996. Neversoft continued to expand during 1996, expanding to over twenty employees. 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 technology developed there was used in their next project, a conversion of the PC game MDK. Towards the end of 1996, Neversoft sold the idea for Big Guns to Sony Computer Entertainment and they began development. 1997 was a