Neversoft Merges With Infinity Ward

Neversoft Merges With Infinity Ward

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Longtime Tony Hawk developer Neversoft is merging with Call of Duty studio Infinity Ward, bring to a close the end of a twenty-plus year run for the company. The news comes via an internal memo from Activision Publisher CEO Eric Hirschberg, who wrote that it made sense of Neversoft to join the Call of Duty fold following their work helping to develop last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts.

"Through that process [working on Ghosts], it became clear that the two studios have very complementary skill sets. Between these two excellent studios, it seemed like a single 'super-studio' could emerge," Hirschberg wrote in the memo.

More notably, Neversoft's key developers – president Joel Jewett and studio director Scott Pease – are retiring as part of the merger. 

"As a gamer, all I can say is that I hope both Joel and Scott come of 'out of retirement' someday and develop more great Activision games for us all to play," Hirshberg said in the memo. "As a colleague of Joel and Scott’s, all I can say is thank you and congratulations on an incredible run."

The newly-bolstered Infinity Ward now joins Sledgehammer Games and Treyarch to make a CoD trifecta – no telling what kind of impact it will have on future games, though now each studio should hopefully have a longer lead-time per entry. 

[Via Giant Bomb]

 

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