The Last of Us co-creators: 'There aren't many games that are great because the story is great'

“There are some zombies, I’m not going to lie, and they are scary,” he adds with a ready – even proud – smile. “But what they represent is the danger of the world around us. The danger of nature. So, we do not make this for one kind of person – we make it for everyone.”

Prior to the unveiling of the long-in-development TV interpretation of The Last of Us, expectations were mixed. Fans of the video game were proprietorially concerned about how their beloved characters – heroic Joel, guardian of plucky Ellie, the teenager whose immunity to zombie infection could save the world – would translate to a different medium.

Culture-watchers knew that transforming interactive video games – whether Halo, Super Mario or, most recently, Cate Blanchett box-office bomb Borderlands – into engaging big- or small-screen drama was a rocky road. Regular TV viewers questioned the appeal of yet another zombie apocalypse survival thriller.

Well, hold on to your joysticks... Mirroring the blockbuster sales of its source IP, The Last of Us, which debuted on Sky in January 2023, was a triumph of gripping, beautiful, humanistic and, yes, terrifying storytelling starring The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal as Joel and Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey as Ellie, battling their way across a zombie-plagued America.

It made British actor Ramsey, 17 when they began filming, a global star, and Pascal an online phenomenon. One episode, Long, Long Time, starring Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus) and Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation), a tender, intimate story of love in the face of global doom, became a sensation in its own right. Overall, the nine-episode series was HBO’s most watched debut season ever. At the following year’s Emmys, The Last of Us won eight of the 24 awards for which it was nominated.

Now comes the second season, based on the video game’s Part II, in which we catch up with Ellie and Joel five years later (“Happy new year 2029” runs the banner at a festive party). They’re safe, relatively speaking, in a fortified community in snowbound Jackson, Wyoming. Safe, that is, apart from the traditional teenage/father-figure tension plaguing the relationship between Nirvana-playing, sexuality-exploring Ellie and overprotective Joel. And apart from the fact that the fungally infected undead who still encircle the compound just might be evolving…

“We see that they’ve actually gotten very good at this,” explains Mazin, who has previous experience of creating TV drama dealing with disasters in the form of the awards-hoovering Chernobyl (2019). “They are no longer scared of confronting a stalker or two. They know how to kill them easily, and they have patrols… But of course, while they are progressing, so too is nature. And it’s the progress of Jackson – the fact that they have to expand and renovate old homes to bring in refugees [fleeing the undead] and house them – that is what disturbs the evolutionary balance.”

Joining as a newcomer, playing Abby, a vengeful militia member out to kill Joel, is Kaitlyn Dever. Although the 28-year-old American star of Booksmart and Dopesick is, in fact, an “oldcomer” – she was attached to the part of Ellie when Neil Druckmann, the second showrunner and the video game’s co-developer, was first in talks to adapt The Last of Us. That was over a decade ago, which is how long it’s taken to get this right for television.

The video game’s creation obviously dates even further back. It’s earliest iteration came while Druckmann was studying for a Master’s in the entertainment technology programme at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. For an assignment, students had to come up with a video game based on 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and pitch it to the film’s director, George Romero (a friend of Druckmann’s professor). “Then George would pick his favourite and we would develop that over the semester as a game prototype.”

Lifelong horror fan Druckmann duly came up with a concept influenced by that year-zero zombie movie. His pitch to Romero: “You play a cop who lost his daughter in this zombie apocalypse world. Then, there’s another girl, her parents were divorced [and] she’s lost her dad. These two characters have to team up and cross the country. You would start playing as the older man with a heart condition. And whenever his heart condition would act up, you would play as the girl. I really wanted to play with the idea of, ‘Who is the protector? Who is the hero in the story?’”

Unfortunately, Romero wasn’t persuaded by the pitch and the class went with another student’s submission. “But I was intrigued by this concept. I started working on it as a comic book, but that didn’t really go anywhere. Eventually, I got a job at Naughty Dog, and I got to pitch the game again years later. And that became The Last of Us.”

After its 2013 launch by Naughty Dog, “People outside of the games industry would tell me how much The Last of Us resonated with them,” remembers Druckmann. The offers to adapt it came thick and fast. But having gone “through a lot of false starts” trying to adapt another Naughty Dog game called Uncharted, Druckmann was pessimistic. “We were a bit disillusioned about the whole endeavour. So, for a long time, we said: ‘Let’s not do it. It’s just going to be another waste of time.’”

Then came Mazin’s Chernobyl, the compulsively binge-worthy drama retelling humankind’s worst ever nuclear accident. “It’s material that, on the surface, should be unwatchable,” says Druckmann. “It’s just so dark. But when I did watch it, I felt like I was watching an incredible thriller.”

Luckily, the love went both ways – Mazin was a huge fan of The Last of Us. “Not all games are created equal,” he says. “Some games are great because the gameplay is great. There aren’t many games that are great because the story and the central relationship are great.

It’s just not as common, because it is not the priority of the medium. But The Last of Us managed to do both things beautifully. It was incredibly entertaining to play and it had a remarkable narrative at its heart. I’ve wanted to make this adaptation ever since I played it for the first time.”

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The Last of Us season 1 is available on Sky Atlantic and NOW with an Entertainment Membership. Season 2 will be released on 13th April 2025.

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