How The Last of Us became the ‘greatest story’ ever told in video games

The Last of Us Launched on PS3 in 2013, the game was a premium narrative experience. Naughty dog, the studio responsible for creating this game set the benchmark in story-centric games. This was a departure from traditional Hollywood formats. It is Uncharted Nathan Drake, an Indiana Jones character with the fortune of John McClane was credited for creating games that mimicked adventure movies’ spectacle. But Last of Us saw the studio pivot from blockbuster action into a genre that dominated the early 2000s — the dystopia — and in the process brought the quality of prestige TV drama to video games. This game’s timing was perfect, and its impact has been unstoppable since.

Last of Us and its various iterations have held dominance over the game industry for nearly a decade, and now it’s poised to do the same in the world that inspired it. The release of HBO’s Last of Us Series is expected to be released soon, and the early reviews have praised it as one of the most successful video game adaptions. Empire spoke recently with Craig Mazin about his role as one of the major creatives in the project. It is clear that Last of Us is “the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.” Broadly, his opinion echoes many of the major reviews during the game’s 2013 release: IGN I gave it 10/10, and called it a masterpiece. GameSpot called it a “singular adventure”; and Game Informer ended its review with a staccato “you won’t forget it.”

Mazin believes that Mazin’s opinion is based on a relationship with characters and the existence of those characters in a zombie infested desert. He calls the game’s story “grounded” and noted that “it really made you feel” before stating that he’s played games since 1977 and never experienced anything like it. It is an argument that many of us have seen over and again as we examine the relationships between game culture (and traditional film culture) in the past. In 2004, Steven Spielberg claimed that a sign of games’ medium maturity will be “when someone confesses that they cried at Level 17.” Controversially, and to the ire of many game players, Roger Ebert doubled down many times about the relationship of games to true emotional experience, writing in 2010 that “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

It’s clear that we’ve lived long enough to cry at Level 17 and many people, including someone with a substantial development deal with a major network, have decided that the greatest video game story ever told could make a great television show.

How do you make it work? Last of UsMazin was one of the many people who stood out.

Image: Naughty dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Last of UsThe game introduces Joel to the players. He is a survivor from a fungal disease that decimated the earth and has created thin enclaves that attempt to protect themselves against infected zombies. CordycepsThey become attack-ready monsters by putting them under strain. The game opens with the death of Joel’s daughter, then depicts him many years later as he is unwillingly tasked with taking care of Ellie, a young girl who is immune to infection. Together, they travel the United States in search of Fireflies who claim to have a cure. They meet other survivors and murderers along the route. There are also a lot of infected people that they must stealth-cutter and shoot through. Joel returns to being an emotional human after his life as a survivor and Ellie is able to grow from a teenager into a woman. They eventually form a father/daughter relationship. This is made possible by a stunningly contradictory but still highly debateable ending.

If Last of UsThe relationship between the story of the game and its narrative was highlighted in major reviews. Polygon’s own review points out that the game’s stealth sections and wobbly gunplay generate a tension that sets itself apart from other third-person action games, noting that the rhythm of avoiding enemies or clumsily fighting them lent a context to the relationship between protagonists Joel and Ellie. Game Informer Similar claims were made by Neil Druckmann, who extended it to the scarcity of world resources and asked players to find the necessary supplies to create critical gameplay items. This would enable them to tackle the major story challenges. As game co-director and show co-creator Neil Druckmann once said himself, “a lot of the storytelling happens on the joystick.”

While action games with heavy story elements have tended to follow the gameplay-to-story-segment-to-gameplay rhythm since the 1990s, with franchises like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto generating discourse around whether or not you skip the cutscenes, the blockbuster games of the early 2000s that came before Last of Us Naughty Dog could use this track to help determine the best and most harmful practices. The Halo, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and Assassin’s Creed Franchises were primarily known for their innovative gameplay and easily segmented stories. Along with Naughty Dog’s own Uncharted Games were a whole media industry that concentrated around expensive and highly promoted action games. These games claimed to have both mature, serious stories as well as compelling gameplay.

There are many reasons why. Last of Us Many have aspired to the status of masterpiece. One is Naughty Dog’s willingness to lean into cinematic language. Each narrative piece in Last of Us The PS3’s hardware allowed for highly animated characters that react to the environment. For small spaces and close-ups, the large cameras and the dramatic cuts of elements throughout the world used in blockbuster video games have been abandoned. In narrative theory, we call this focalization, a fancy word for sticking close to the thoughts and feelings of the characters we’re seeing the world through and with. Last of Us This is a game that is very focused. This was also the focus of narrative strategies. They created complex characters with carefully crafted actions that were not just aimed at solving the problems but also addressed a wider range of emotions. Given the circumstances, this may not be surprising. Last of Us’ developers credit fiction guru Robert McKee’s highly programmatic textbook Story Here are some fundamental assumptions regarding player involvement in story and actions.

Image: Naughty dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

The game’s drama also benefits from performances centered in tightly directed motion-capture sequences. Some of the most moving scenes are shown with only the graphics visible, such as in the official Last of Us Making-of document GroundedIt is clear that the emotional portrayals in the game are driven by the actor’s voice and body acting. It’s clear that Naughty Dog knew what they had, given that one of the earliest promotional pieces for the game was an evocative vocal performance from Troy Baker, the video game actor who plays Joel, talking wistfully about the world gone away. It pulls a person in purely on performance in a gesture that’s more familiar to theatrical trailers. Video games are more likely to use a strange 3D render of the gun on a website promotion than an audio voice-over. These were notable in 2013, and stood out against more narrative-centric video games like Gears of War or Call of Duty that were more traditional science fiction like Gears of War.

These tones didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Similar to the Uncharted adventure movies, Last of Us The video of Baker speaking over stock footage was intensified and further mined to include a number of highly-popular artistic references taken from other media. The video of Baker speaking over stock footage was not the only thing posted on the early official website for the game — there was also a 14-second clip lifted from a section of BBC’s massively popular Planet Earth A nature documentary that showed the impact of the Cordyceps The idea of fungus in ants was the basis for this concept. Last of Us’ infected enemies. In that way, the core concept of the game was ripped from the headlines in the way that science fiction texts have always done, giving the game’s concepts a sense of familiarity for many players and a plausible explanatory concept.

Other references might be less obvious but are more general. Zombie media had built-in popularity across the early 2000s, with early standouts in film being 2002’s 28 days later and 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake. This popular book was published in 2003. The Zombie Survival Guide, written in a matter-of-fact tone about the “real” things someone should do about zombies should the problem arise, provided some conceptual backbone for a disparate array of multimedia work. By 2010, an entire zombie phenomenon had slowly crept its way into American media culture, even infecting genres far beyond its horror roots — just look at the virality of Pride and Prejudice: ZombiesSimulator for the Bill Murray Murder Simulation Zombieland. 2010’s The Walking Dead The show, which ran on AMC until 2022 took the zombie idea seriously, and added a lot of drama. Leaning into some of the aspects that made Cormac McCarthy’s The Road A bestseller that Oprah loved half a century earlier. The Walking DeadThis template included acceptable zombie gore, charged violence and parent-child relationships. The model is still used today in its original form. These resonances are so strongly felt that Kirk Hamilton’s review for Kotaku summarized these last two paragraphs succinctly by stating that Last of Us is “built on the skeleton of so many post-apocalyptic stories before it” and that it “embraces the tropes of zombie fiction” to the hilt.

Image: Naughty dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

An additional context that has to be noted here is the notion of “prestige TV,” sometimes talked about as the golden age of TV, which generally just means the increased budgets and aspirations of television during the early 2000s and carrying into today. This is a list of shows The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad MenAnd Breaking Bad The new shows are able to present different types of stories than the TV show’s past. This was possible due to both budgetary expansion and an increase in cable. It also allows for more language and violence that is acceptable for TV. They mainly featured glowering, stoic men who frequently acted in a manner that was often obnoxious to those around them. They were also filmed in styles that were underexplored on television, becoming the mascots for “serious” TV work and generally consuming the entire TV drama space, and they often deployed a kind of stoic whiteness up against a broader, racialized public they were in contest with (a thematic that Last of Us Also unfortunately, inherited.

All that remains is to be said: Last of Us didn’t come out of nowhere. The idea of this unique piece of art was not created from the mind of an entire team of geniuses. It was influenced by culture, which allowed it to embrace its key executions and innovations. This culture helped to make the game more enjoyable and understand the underlying themes.

Another way of thinking about this is through another massive narrative success in games, which has had a substantial impact on the design of games and their narratives for a full decade: 2012’s The Walking DeadTelltale created the title. It received a lot of praises and had a strong critical and player reaction. The game shares many themes related to family and maturation with Last of UsThe game asks questions similar to those of the zombie genre about how they might behave at the end. The game’s appeal to the zombie theme, as well as its ability to pull on out-of-favor adventure games, made it a popular choice for many.

The Walking Dead was a critical game in a broader wave of what was termed the “dadification” of games. This move, which has seen some late entries like 2022’s God of War RagnarökDads, and the relationships they have with their children, were central to game plots. Dadification is less a cohesive genre than an thematic movement in 2010-released games. It remains, however, a shorthand to describe paternal feelings as the driving motivation of the characters we identify with. This was perhaps more clearly expressed than ever in Last of Us. The game famously opens with the death of Joel’s daughter, and the remainder of the game is about the developing surrogate daughter relationship that he has with his ward and cargo Ellie (a reading mentioned often by the developers themselves in the official Last of Us podcast.) As game developer and critic Mattie Brice noted shortly after release, this killing of Joel’s daughter in the prologue of the game in order to explain him as a character operates as “a dad’s version of fridging a girlfriend at the beginning of a game,” referring to a common narrative technique of aligning us with men by harming the women in their lives.

The final piece in the puzzle to explain the phenomenon of Last of UsThe money spent and how it was made is what has contributed to the game’s longevity as an outstanding achievement in narrative gaming. Naughty Dog, a Sony subsidiary, makes games. These are just a few of the core developers such as Sony Santa Monica or Guerrilla Games who create products to show the seriousness of Sony’s curatorship of prestige and mature titles. Last of Us Sony is an important franchise that represents the artistic sensibilities. Only two years later, then-president of Sony Shawn Layden was pitching the “power of narrative” as a crucial lens through which to see player and audience investment in video game products.

Even after the release Last of Us Thanks to Naughty dog and Sony, the franchise never lost their appeal. Original game released in summer 2013. The short, but critical DLC was added later. Don’t Be Left Behind Followed in 2014 and then later the same year Remastered: The Last of Us It was released for PlayStation 4. Although it was six years until the official sequel was released, the game remained a part of the PlayStation family and was consistently teased and promoted from 2016’s sequel tease onward. The release of the second game last year was followed by the TV show. This shows that the corporate system gave the company a considerable financial and promotion push, even though there were numerous complaints about the developer.

Image: Naughty dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Naughty Do and Sony both have attempted to keep the conversation going about the series for the past ten years, but a large portion of it has been maintained by those who enjoy the games’ ideas. “How do you interpret the end of Last of Us?” is a perennial topic for fans and game critics alike, and debating interpretations of the game makes up a substantial amount of the words written about it.

Following the publication of Part 2 of The Last of UsAs Bruce Straley was co-director, it became clear that the tone of the conversations had changed. Last of UsNaughty Dog is now gone after the release Uncharted 4. Fans started to debate openly who was responsible for the creation of this film. Last of Us’ final direction, creating elaborate explanations of how the treatment of co-director Neil Druckmann as an auteur did a disservice to the broader efforts of the team. This was present in Naughty Dog’s official promotion as well, given that Straley is first mentioned in the official podcast 40 minutes into the first episode as an aside to explain something a combat designer is discussing, and after Troy Baker calls Druckmann the greatest director he has ever worked with. Druckmann’s position as the face of the product created a situation where he was a direct target of harassment for those with a political grievance against the project, a situation only made more complicated by the sequel’s structural borrowing from real-world geopolitics. Druckmann was the beneficiary of an investment. The These conversations are likely to follow the IP, as he is the creative force behind this project and has become a key creative in the TV show’s development.

This is a cynical view of the world Last of Us’ sustained popularity over the past 10 years, and its status as a great game narrative, is that it hit the market with just the right genre tropes and the right amount of capital expenditure to hammer itself into the public mind. The company behind the success knew how important it was to have an original IP that has an author. This is why we now have a highly-priced TV program that will promote this IP further.

That’s a hard view, and I take a softer approach: With Last of UsNaughty Dog The process of creating prestige video games was approached in such a manner that the writing and dialogue processes, as well as the capture and recording of performances were subordinated to traditional cinematic techniques. The game stood out and, more importantly, was made to stand out by this decision. legibly As a tale of harsh truths and hard roads. Craig Mazin is a screenwriter and will be paired up with John August in their Screenwriting 101 course. Scriptnotespodcast), is well on his path to attaining the wide-ranging fame of Robert McKee. highlights Last of Us The greatest videogame story. The game is presented in the same televisual structures that he’s familiar with. He also has a hand in making them more serious pieces of art.

Last of Us It is possible to convert from an important game to a prestige TV drama. This allows people to interact with the original game and possibly seek it out. It can also be seen as an opportunity to develop the IP outside of the confines of console gaming, particularly as mobile games maintain their dominance in the industry. This will redefine the status of prestige narrative titles you play on big machines that are near televisions. It is possible to play the game on a large machine that sits near a television. Last of Us Although it was initially created to be a game on the internet, its life could expand and it may even have a second existence.