The Neverhood

The Neverhood is a point-and-click adventure game which emphasizes the solving of puzzles through character action rather than inventory usage. Klaymen must use the available environment in order to advance in the game, with the standard inventory being quasi-absent. There are possible game-overs if the player is not careful enough, with one where the game cannot be restored from a previous save and must be restarted.

The titular Neverhood is a surreal landscape dotted with buildings and other hints of life, all suspended above an endless void. However, the Neverhood itself is strangely deserted, with its only inhabitants being Klaymen (the main protagonist and player character), Willie Trombone (a dim individual who assists Klaymen in his travels), Klogg (the game's antagonist who resembles a warped version of Klaymen), and various fauna that inhabit the Neverhood (most infamously the "weasels", monstrous, crab-like creatures that pursue Klaymen and Willie at certain points in the game). Much of the game's background information is limited to the "Hall of Records", which is notorious for its length, taking several minutes to travel from one end of the hall to the other.

The game begins with Klaymen waking up in a room and exploring the Neverhood, collecting various discs appearing to contain a disjointed story narrated by Willie (which Klaymen can view through various terminals scattered throughout the land). As Klaymen travels the Neverhood, he occasionally crosses paths with Willie, who agrees to help him in his journey, while Klogg spies on them from afar. Eventually, Klaymen's quest directs him to Klogg's castle, and for this Klaymen enlists the help of Big Robot Bil, a towering automaton and a friend of Willie's. As Bil (with Klaymen and Willie on board) marches to Klogg's castle, Klogg unleashes his guardian, the Clockwork Beast, to intercept Bil.

Doug TenNapel came up with the idea of a plasticine world in 1988, creating approximately 17 structures. Due to his dissatisfaction with the way David Perry ran Shiny Entertainment, TenNapel left the company in 1995. , which consisted of a number of people who worked on the Earthworm Jim game and its sequel. Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, which had recently started, needed fresh and unusual projects and TenNapel approached Spielberg with the idea of a claymation game, with Spielberg accepting it for publication.

The Neverhood, Inc. made a deal with DreamWorks Interactive and Microsoft, and the game went for development. According to the developers, creating the game's characters and scenery used up over three tons of clay. The Neverhood was shown at E3 1996 under the title The Neverhood: A Curious Wad of Klay Finds His Soul.

According to Leslie Helm of the Los Angeles Times, The Neverhood "won rave reviews" but was commercially unsuccessful. In early 1997, that paper's Greg Miller reported that the game's "sales have been slow and [it] isn't even carried by all of the largest stores, including Target". This came at a time when big-box stores were increasingly important for securing sales, as many specialized video game retailers had closed due to competition with these outside companies. By August 1997, The Neverhood had sold 37,000 copies in the United States. Sales in the region had risen to 41,073 copies by April 1999, a figure that CNET Gamecenter's Marc Saltzman called "embarrassing".

The Neverhood's total sales ultimately surpassed 50,000 copies, and "hundreds of thousands" of OEM copies were purchased by Gateway and pre-installed on its line of computers, according to Mike Dietz. It also received a huge fan base in Russia and Iran as a result of the massive bootleg copying and distribution of pre-installed games on computers.