HBO’s The Last of Us show is “gonna be so authentic to the original games”
By Ashley Hurst
Adapting beloved video games to the screen is difficult. Sometimes we get decent results, but for every Arcane, there’s an Assassin’s Creed. But HBO aims to do it right with their adaptation of Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic zombie game The Last of us, which is one of the most cinematic video games ever created.
If you’ve played The Last of Us, you know that the story lends itself to TV. The game is deeply story-driven. Set years into the apocalypse, we follow Joel (Pedro Pascal), who is tasked with smuggling Ellie (Bella Ramsey) — a girl who’s immune to the zombie virus — out of an oppressive quarantine zone. He must cross a zombie-infested America to reach a group called the Fireflies, which will use Ellie’s immunity to create a vaccine. Over the course of their journey, Joel becomes something of a father figure to Ellie. Yes, this is yet another project in which Pedro Pascal becomes a father figure.
The Last of Us has become the biggest production in Canadian history. Up to now, we haven’t seen all that much from the show, but HBO recently released a tiny teaser. Take a look:
Original designer on The Last of Us is excited by what he’s seen of the HBO show
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Matthew Gallant, the designer of the original game and director of the recent remake, gave the show his stamp of approval. “It gave me goosebumps to watch the [HBO] trailer, as little footage as that was,” Gallant said. “I felt like I was wanting to watch it over and over again, and catch all the little details.”
As the man behind the design of the original game, he was delighted with how they’ve handled bringing it to live-action. “They really, really care about the art direction,” he added. “That two-second clip of the infected embedded in the wall. That looks like it’s right out of the game. The way the characters’ outfits look. The way certain lines are delivered in that trailer.”
"That’s often not true in video game adaptations. They often take really big creative license with the original franchise. This looks like it’s just gonna be so authentic to the original games. And as someone who loves the original games, I’m so excited to see that being explored in a different medium."
The video game quite literally changed the game for the industry. The balance between exquisite storytelling and gameplay was superb, with one never getting in the way of the other. “We’re not gonna do the thing that every other video game was doing in 2012: You do a bunch of fighting, and then you watch a movie, and then you do a bunch of fighting, and then you watch a movie,” Gallant said. “When you’re in control of the character, we call it ‘on the stick.’ They were like, ‘When you’re on the stick, everything that’s happening there is telling the story. And, yeah, there’s gonna be cinematics. You’re gonna watch a scene play out with these characters interacting, but then you’re gonna go back into gameplay and you’re also gonna be getting the story there.”
HBO’s The Last of Us doesn’t have a release date yet, but it looks likely to drop early in 2023. That feels like the best possible time to release it, especially with the long-running zombie drama The Walking Dead ending later this year.
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