New Kid in Town : Artist Who Created Neverhood Is Playing With the Big Boys in Interactive Games

LAGUNA HILLS —  The crew at Neverhood jokingly refers to company founder Douglas TenNapel as the mayor.

And, like any good mayor, TenNapel is trying to take care of his constituents--in this case by wrapping up a multimillion-dollar contract that Laguna Hills-based Neverhood recently won to design electronic games for DreamWorks SKG, the high-flying entertainment company formed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Terms of the contract weren’t revealed, but observers said the deal will allow TenNapel’s new, privately held company to attract a strong stable of game designers who previously helped create some of the fast-paced electronic game industry’s hottest titles. As word of the contract spread last week, a handful of game designers at competing firms quit their jobs in order to move into what TenNapel describes as “the Neverhood.”

Small, creative companies like Neverhood, which temporarily is housed in TenNapel’s Laguna Hills home, are playing an integral role in the rapidly evolving interactive game industry.

American consumers are expected to spend more than $4 billion on electronic entertainment products this year and another $6 billion on game machines. And interactive industry players, including DreamWorks, are scrambling to find multimedia developers who can deliver quality products.

“Doug is an incredibly creative guy, and all the people on his staff have a proven track record,” said John Skeel, a DreamWorks executive producer. “That’s why we’re working with them.”

Neverhood takes its name from a series of dreamy paintings that San Diego native TenNapel completed in the late 1980s. Neverhood also is the title of the first interactive game that TenNapel will develop for DreamWorks as part of the three-year contract.

TenNapel, whose name reflects his Dutch heritage, described Neverhood as a word play on neighborhood.

“It’s a beautiful day in the Neverhood,” TenNapel said. “It’s a never-never land, a neighborhood that never existed. The player has to make difficult decisions to solve problems and make tough moral decisions . . . deciding whether the world will exist or not.”

TenNapel, 29, dreamed up Neverhood in 1988 as the title for a series of paintings that were displayed at a framing gallery near the pier in Ocean Beach, a funky San Diego neighborhood.

TenNapel said that he often revives characters from a storehouse of ideas that he’s developed over the years. For example, he dreamed up Earthworm Jim, an unlikely super-hero, in the late 1980s. Earthworm Jim was revived in 1993 as the star of a hugely popular electronic game.

Earthworm Jim lives in a decidedly humorous world populated by the likes of Major Mucus, Professor Monkey-for-a-Head and Princess What’s-Her-Name. The game turns on the lowly worm’s acquisition of super powers after a magical spacesuit worn by an otherworldly traveler falls on him.

The worm has turned big bucks for TenNapel and Shiny Entertainment, a small, Laguna Beach-based company that developed the game: More than a million copies of “Earthworm Jim” have been sold. A sequel will be released later this year--at about the same time a television cartoon show and action figures make their debut.

TenNapel left Shiny in May, shortly after the company was sold to Irvine-based Interplay Productions in a deal that observers valued at about $7 million. As is often the case in the fast-paced industry, a handful of animators who worked with TenNapel at Shiny quickly jumped ship to Neverhood, which also is leasing office space in Mission Viejo.

It was “Earthworm Jim”--a game that’s simple enough for kids yet sophisticated enough to appeal to adults--that helped open the door for the DreamWorks deal. TenNapel said that he’d earlier pitched an idea to DreamWorks co-founder Spielberg, but didn’t expect a deal to materialize so quickly.

“It was all very surprising,” said TenNapel, of conversations this past spring that led to the deal coming together. “I’d written them a letter before--a ‘Hey, you guys wanna do something?’ letter--and got something like a form letter back.”

TenNapel was more successful, though, at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, when he met with Spielberg to pitch the planned Neverhood game and characters.

“He liked it,” said TenNapel, who added that he had an unexpected ally: “It turns out Spielberg’s son loves ‘Earthworm Jim.’ ”

TenNapel professes not to be awed by his new affiliation with some of Hollywood’s biggest names: “You find out that Steven has soap in his bathroom just like everyone else.”

TenNapel described DreamWorks as his first choice for a strategic partner. “They’ve got the contacts and the capital and a major funder of DreamWorks’ interactive division is Microsoft, so we get to take advantage of all of that,” he said.

Associates describe TenNapel as a rare example in the burgeoning game industry of a creative guy who’s grounded in the business world. One sign of TenNapel’s business savvy is the fact that he’s retained strong control over how Earthworm Jim is to be incorporated into a sequel, a cartoon show and action figures.

“It’s very unusual for someone like Doug to retain so much creative control,” said Jeff Segal, president of MCA/Universal Family Entertainment and Universal Cartoon Studios. “He’s wildly creative . . . but he understands business parameters and is wildly creative within those boundaries.”

While TenNapel operates in a decidedly high-tech arena, drawing and art remain his forte. In 1991, he began drawing Saturday morning cartoons for the Fox Network. In 1992, he moved into video games with Virgin Interactive Entertainment in Irvine. Within months, however, he left Virgin for Shiny.

“A lot of [game] designers are young guys working out of jury-rigged computer rooms at home,” Segal said. “But Doug is different. He’s an artist.’

“I’m not a high-tech guy,” agreed TenNapel, a graduate of Point Loma Nazarene College in San Diego. “I’ve worked with a computer for five years but I still can’t copy one Windows file to another.”

And, while Neverhood’s success is tied to the technology explosion that’s made interactive games possible, TenNapel plans to break away and fulfill a childhood dream.

“My goal is to get back to traditional [art] forms,” said TenNapel, who began drawing cartoons as a 4-year-old. “We’re talking about multiple game deals with DreamWorks, but my goal in the future is to draw cartoons on paper, just do it all by myself . . . maybe just a small comic book--all by myself.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Key Residents of Neverhood

Electronic game designer Neverhood, based in Laguna Hills, is attracting top talent with its new contract to design interactive games for DreamWorks SKG. Neverhood’s top designers and video game projects they have worked on:

Douglas TenNapel

* Title: Founder and director/animator

* Projects: “Earthworm Jim,” “Earthworm Jim 2,” “Jungle Book,” “Stimpy’s Invention,” “Jurassic Park”

Mark Lorenzen

* Title: Art engineer/background artist

* Projects: “VECTORMAN,” “Earthworm Jim 2,” “Jurassic Park Rampage Edition,” “Looney Tunes’ Desert Demolition,” “Joe Montana NFL Football,” “World Series Baseball,” “Jurassic Park”

Mike Dietz

* Title: Animation director

* Projects: “Earthworm Jim,” “Earthworm Jim 2,” “Jungle Book,” “Cool Spot”

Edward Schofield

* Title: Animator

* Projects: “Earthworm Jim,” “Earthworm Jim 2,” “Jungle Book,” “Aladdin,” “Cool Spot”

Source: Neverhood