tumultuous year for Neversoft. 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 company shrunk back to just twelve employees. Neversoft spent the next few months shopping around their technology, meeting with numerous companies and looking for work. In January 1998, just as Neversoft was about to run out of money, they had a meeting with Activision, who were looking for someone to re-develop Apocalypse, a failed internal project. The technology developed for Big Guns turned out to be ideal for the project, Activision was impressed and Neversoft began work on Apocalypse. In May 1998, Apocalypse was going very well, and Activision signed up Neversoft to develop a prototype for a skateboarding game. This proceeded slowly as they could not spare many people from Apocalypse. The initial prototypes resembled the arcade game Top Skater. 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. From 1999 to 2007, Neversoft developed nine Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games and increased their employees to over 150. In 2005, Neversoft developed a Western action-adventure open world game entitled Gun, alongside Beenox and Rebellion Developments. 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. The games following Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock would be developed by Vicarious Visions, developers of the Wii ports and Guitar Hero: Van Halen. In light of this, 50 employees were laid off on February 11, 2010. 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". 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. Release history Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (THPS) was