The Neverhood

Did You Know?

• The game's soundtrack, composed by Terry Scott Taylor, won GMR magazine's Best Game Music of the Year award.
• A claymation film adaptation was announced in 2007 but cancelled due to lack of funding.

Plot

The Neverhood is a surreal landscape suspended above an endless void, dotted with buildings and hints of life but largely deserted. Its inhabitants include Klaymen, the protagonist; Willie Trombone, a dim assistant; Klogg, a warped antagonist; and various fauna, notably monstrous, crablike weasels. Background information is limited to the Hall of Records, a lengthy corridor. Klaymen wakes in a room and explores, collecting discs that contain a disjointed story narrated by Willie, viewable through terminals. He occasionally meets Willie, who agrees to help, while Klogg spies on them. Klaymen eventually seeks entry to Klogg's castle and enlists Big Robot Bil, a towering automaton friend of Willie's. As Bil marches to the castle with Klaymen and Willie aboard, Klogg sends the Clockwork Beast to intercept. Bil defeats the beast and forces open the castle door, but Klogg fires a cannon, gravely injuring Bil. Klaymen enters the castle, but Bil loses his footing and falls into the void with Willie inside.

Development

Doug TenNapel conceived a plasticine world in 1988, building about 17 structures. He left Shiny Entertainment in 1995 due to dissatisfaction with David Perry's management, and two weeks later announced his own company, The Neverhood, Inc., staffed by former Earthworm Jim developers. Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, seeking fresh projects, accepted TenNapel's claymation idea for publication. A deal was made with DreamWorks and Microsoft. Creating the characters and scenery used over three tons of clay. The game was shown at E3 1996 as The Neverhood: A Curious Wad of Klay Finds His Soul. After a year of work, it was released in 1996. All game elements were shot on beta versions of the Minolta RD-175, making it the first stop-motion production to use consumer digital cameras professionally. A Japanese PlayStation port followed in 1998, and a fan-made Russian dub appeared in 1997, with Russian subtitles in 2022 and Czech subtitles in 2026.

Reception

The Neverhood won rave reviews but was commercially unsuccessful. By early 1997, sales were slow and the game was not carried by all large stores, including Target, at a time when big-box retailers were crucial. By August 1997, it had sold 37,000 copies in the United States; by April 1999, sales reached 41,073 copies, a figure called embarrassing by CNET Gamecenter's Marc Saltzman. Total sales ultimately surpassed 50,000 copies, with hundreds of thousands of OEM copies purchased by Gateway and pre-installed on its computers. The game gained a large fan base in Russia and Iran through bootleg copying and pre-installed copies. A Next Generation critic praised the visual style and graphics execution but found puzzles unexciting and the pace slow. GameSpot found visuals endearing but puzzles unfairly difficult and frustrating. GamePro contradicted, stating puzzles were perplexing but not obscure. Weekly Famitsu scored the PlayStation version 29 out of 40. The game was named best adventure game of 1996 by Computer Games Strategy Plus and CNET Gamecenter, and was nominated for Gamecenter's Game of the Year, which went to Quake. It won Computer Gaming World's 1996 Special Award for Artistic Achievement, and was nominated for the Computer Game Developers Conference's Best Animation Spotlight Award, losing to Tomb Raider.

Sequels

A sequel, Skullmonkeys, was released in 1998 for the PlayStation as a platform game, abandoning the point-and-click adventure format. A Japan-only PlayStation game, Klaymen Gun-Hockey, set in the Neverhood universe, was a sports action game based on air hockey played with guns, developed and published by Riverhillsoft, not by the original designers, and lacking the claymation design. Klaymen appears as a secret fighter in the PlayStation game BoomBots, developed by The Neverhood, Inc. In 2013, TenNapel partnered with former Neverhood and Earthworm Jim artists Ed Schofield and Mike Dietz of Pencil Test Studios to develop Armikrog, a clay and stop-motion animated point-and-click adventure game, not a sequel, released on September 30, 2015.