
This is when he meets Ellie, a 14-year-old he’s hired to smuggle halfway across the country.
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Long before pitching it to Sony-owned development studio Naughty Dog, at the time known best for its “Indiana Jones”-inspired “Uncharted” series, Druckmann had tried to spin the story into a comic.Īfter its harrowing beginning, “The Last of Us” - both the game and the HBO series - jumps 20 years into the future, where an even more hardened Joel has failed to process his grief over losing his daughter. He began developing what would become “The Last of Us” while a master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University. To Druckmann, 44, the story was personal. Our approach was, as much as we can, let’s treat it as grounded as possible and as realistic as possible.” But if we’re going to tell a story about the love a parent has for their child, we have to deal with the worst fear a parent has, which is any sort of harm coming to their child, and realize that through that opening sequence.

One thing ‘Grand Theft Auto’ doesn’t have are kids in that world. “You almost never showed a kid dying in a video game,” Druckmann says when asked about the game’s difficult opening moments. Neil Druckmann, the game’s writer and the show’s co-creator, still speaks proudly of the way “The Last of Us” pushed boundaries, whether that was in its diversity or simply in its willingness to nudge players to feel the extremities of anguish. “And in an action game, a game historically made for the ‘hardcore player,’ ‘The Last of Us’ starts helping us rethink what we can do in AAA games.” games is it showed that we could handle tremendous complexity in a narrative structure about social issues,” says Jennifer deWinter, a game scholar, author and dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “The Last of Us” raised moral quandaries about choice, or the lack thereof, in interactive entertainment, questioned masculinity in games and ultimately proved to the industry that a gay teenage girl could be a protagonist in a genre overrun with tired machismo. No, it’s because “The Last of Us” always felt like a mission statement, a game that wanted to prove that big-budget action shooters - “AAA games” in industry speak - could not only have a sense of gravitas but could advance the medium in narrative, gameplay and representation. Now, “The Last of Us” is a hotly anticipated HBO series starring Pedro Pascal as Joel, the latest in a long line of prestigious bleak TV.īut the hype preceding the HBO series, which premieres Sunday, has less to do with the checkered past of video game adaptations or the pedigree of the show’s co-creator, “Chernobyl” architect Craig Mazin. The game went on to sell about 20 million copies for Sony’s PlayStation consoles and spawned both a limited-run comic and a hit sequel. Camera angles were often closely cropped, framing enemies - and infected humans - not as obstacles but as tragedies.Īnd it worked.



In a genre where action and story were often disconnected - serious cinematic scenes against cartoonish violence - “The Last of Us” wanted to keep it real. Action was treated as something to be avoided Joel’s trigger hand would wobble, a reluctant shot in a world in which each close kill would come with suffering. While there’s no shortage of violence in the video game space, “The Last of Us” did it differently.
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Full credits haven’t even rolled before the child doesn’t make it - shot dead on government orders. Then comes a viral outburst that has all of Texas going mad trying to avoid flesh eaters, which sends him and his daughter on the run. Joel, a down-on-his-luck single dad, can’t catch a break. But the difficulty curve was more emotional than technical, for the game delivered the zombie genre at its most heady, grief-stricken and intimate. Sony’s landmark 2013 game “The Last of Us” didn’t make it easy on players.
