Neversoft’s claim to fame is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but now that the studio has added another annual franchise with Guitar Hero, studio director Scott Pease is ready to crank it to 11.

“Gaming’s always been kind of in my blood,” a soft-spoken Pease says in a phone interview. Growing up, he was the typical gamer, playing games like the early Zeldas and having run-ins with his brother over games of Madden on Sega Genesis.

“Like most people at Neversoft, I’ve been a gamer since I was a kid, growing up with consoles in the house and always diving into whatever game was around,” says Pease, who earned a slot at no. 15 on Next-Gen’s Hot 100 Developers list for 2008.

Pease was always interested in game development, but attended college back when there weren’t specialized game development degrees. So Pease earned a film degree and then went straight to look for work in the games industry.

Eventually, he became a designer at Activision, where he started at the beginning of the Tony Hawk series. He later went to Neversoft where he worked on the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

moscallout"From day one, I think we were always trying to find a way to make games faster and more efficiently than anyone else."/moscallout“It’s kind of funny for me. I worked on the Tony Hawk game at Activision, trying to help get it off the ground, and then I left to join Neversoft. Then about five or six months later, Neversoft was acquired by Activision, so I was back to being an Activision employee. … I cannot escape Activision,” he laughs.

As Pease has been with the Tony Hawk series since the beginning, he understands the intricacies of developing a game on an annual basis. Certainly, the Tony Hawk games have proven to be a yearly cash cow for the Activision mothership, generating millions of dollars since the first of the franchise debuted in 1999. Pease believes that Neversoft long ago laid the foundation for a culture and process that facilitates fast development.

“It becomes a way things work, a way of life,” says Pease on the challenges of an annualized franchise. “As our company has grown, our company culture has been built around that model. From day one, I think we were always trying to find a way to make games faster and more efficiently than anyone else, because we found that the faster and more efficiently we deal with things, the more time we have to tweak and fix and change and iterate.

“That’s just been our company motto and drive from day one: how to make quality games as quickly as possible. It’s never really been an option to think about doing things any other way.”