The Neverhood

1001 Video Games

The Neverhood appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Animation

According to Douglas TenNapel, The Neverhood required 3.5 tons of clay and was comprised of 50,000 frames of animation. The production took five animators over a year to complete the game.

All of the animation on the Neverhood was shot digitally on beta versions of Minolta RD 175 cameras. The cameras could only hold a maximum of 114 images on their 131MB PCMCIA card, so the images were constantly dumped once the cards got full. To save storage space the images were processed by crunching them down to 320x240 pixels immediately after they were transferred from the PCMCIA card. More about the animation process: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.9/2.9pages/2.9dietz.html

Development

Steven Spielberg was a big fan of Earthworm Jim, and requested that Douglas TenNapel, creator of the character, design Klaymen in a similar fashion.

Japanese version

The Japanese Playstation version has a flew slight changes. First up, the speed of the game has been doubled. Klaymen walks around the 2D scenes much faster. The walkaround sequences are now much faster also.

The Hall of Records scene (that's the 10-or-so minute walk back and forth across the whole world with the history written on the walls) has been removed completely, probably because it would take too long to translate all of it into Japanese. But, you can still look out the window at the end of the room and see that you have crossed half of the whole world.

References

When you're in the open square with the house with the letter H on it, go inside and solve the puzzle. Keep trying until you get it. Go past the disk-reading machine and leave the lights off in the long, long hallway. Go all the way to the end to the window, and look at the bottom-left corner of the screen. That is Mark Lorenzen's name, one of the designers.

Rating

Although considered a kid-friendly game, The Neverhood still received a Teen rating from the ESRB for Comic Mischief and Mild Animated Violence.

Technology

This was the one of the first games designed to run under DirectX. It came with the DirectX 3.0 install. The game would run under Win NT.

Website

In December 2001, The Neverhood's official website was taken down. The president of Boomerang Studios Matt Pearman saved it for the team and preserved at www.neverhood.co.uk in January 2002 until until February 2006. After that a copy of the original Neverhood site was set up by Rickard Dahlstrand, Sweden: www.neverhood.se

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Special Award for Artistic Achievement
• World Animation Celebration
  • 1997 - Best Production for a Video Game

Information also contributed by Apogee IV, David Mackenzie, Itay Shahar, Scott Monster, Tiger Frampton Zack Green and inkan