The Last of Us (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Last of Us, a 2013 action-adventure game from Naughty Dog, ends with a man swearing to a girl that his story is true. It is not. Joel gives the oath because Ellie insists on it. Everything before that moment is a long walk toward it. What made Ellie worth so much to the people who wanted her? What would Joel give up to keep her alive? And why do so many players and critics still place this game among the best ever made?

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• 2. A Ruined Country

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  The story's own calendar puts the end of the world in 2013. A mutant strain of the Cordyceps fungus spreads through bites and airborne spores, and its human hosts turn into aggressive creatures. Joel is running through the suburbs of Austin, Texas, with his brother Tommy and his daughter Sarah when a soldier shoots her. She dies in Joel's arms.

  Twenty years later, Joel works as a smuggler in a quarantine zone in Boston, Massachusetts, alongside his partner Tess. The zones are controlled by the Federal Disaster Response Agency, or FEDRA. Opposing it is a rebel militia called the Fireflies. Joel and Tess hunt down Robert, a black-market dealer who traded a stolen weapons cache to that militia. The Fireflies' leader, Marlene, offers to double the cache if they smuggle a fourteen-year-old girl named Ellie to Fireflies hiding in the Massachusetts State House.

  Ellie turns out to be infected, yet she says she is immune and might help produce a cure. At the State House, Joel and Tess find the Fireflies already dead. Tess then admits that she was infected on the way. Believing in Ellie, she stays behind to hold off pursuing soldiers so the other two can escape. Joel decides to look for Tommy, a former Firefly, hoping he can find others.

  Bill, a smuggler and survivalist in Lincoln, Massachusetts, helps them find a working vehicle. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bandits ambush them and wreck the car. They team up with two brothers, Henry and Sam. After they get out of the city, Sam is bitten and hides it. When the infection takes hold, he attacks Ellie, and Henry shoots him dead before taking his own life out of grief.

  In the fall, Joel and Ellie reach Jackson, Wyoming. Tommy has built a fortified settlement there near a hydroelectric dam, and his wife Maria lives with him. Joel tries to leave Ellie in their care, and the attempt ends in a confrontation about Sarah. Tommy points the pair toward a Firefly enclave at the University of Eastern Colorado. They find it empty, because the Fireflies have moved to a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bandits attack on the way out, and Joel escapes with a severe wound. A winter in the mountains lies ahead.

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• 3. Winter and the Hospital

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  In the winter chapter, the player stops being Joel. Ellie takes the controls while Joel lies on the brink of death in the mountains and depends on her to keep him alive. She meets David and James, scavengers willing to trade medicine for food. Then David reveals that the bandits from the university were part of his group, and Ellie turns hostile. She draws his people away from Joel but is captured. David means to recruit her into his cannibal group.

  Ellie escapes after killing James, but David corners her in a burning restaurant. Joel, now recovered, goes looking for her. He arrives just as she hacks David to death with a machete. The act traumatizes her, and Joel comforts her before the two flee.

  A herd of giraffes follows. Concept artist John Sweeney said the scene was designed to "reignite Ellie's lust for life" after what she had suffered at David's hands. It belongs to a motif the developers summed up as "life goes on."

  In the spring, Joel and Ellie reach Salt Lake City. Ellie nearly drowns and is unconscious when a Firefly patrol captures them. Inside the hospital, Marlene tells Joel that Ellie is being prepared for surgery. The Fireflies hope to make a vaccine, and doing so means removing the infected portion of her brain, which will kill her. Joel refuses to let that happen. He fights his way to the operating room and kills the lead surgeon.

  He carries the unconscious Ellie to the parking garage, where Marlene confronts him. Joel shoots her dead so the Fireflies cannot follow. The surgery that would have ended Ellie's life never takes place, and the militia loses both its surgeon and its leader.

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• 4. Playing the Survivor

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  In the opening sequence, the player briefly controls Sarah, but for most of the game the hands on the controller are Joel's. The player moves through towns, buildings, forests, and sewers from a third-person view. The weapons are scarce and varied. Long-range options include a rifle, a shotgun, and a bow, while a handgun and a short-barreled shotgun cover close fights. Pipes and baseball bats can be scavenged, though they wear out. Bottles and bricks can be thrown to distract, stun, or attack.

  Crafting runs through the whole experience. Collected items become health kits, shivs, and Molotov cocktails, and workbenches turn them into weapon upgrades. Pills and medicinal plants raise attributes such as the health meter and crafting speed.

  Direct assault is only one option. A feature called Listen Mode gives the player a heightened sense of hearing and spatial awareness, drawing enemies as outlines visible through walls and objects. A player who stays unseen can attack from behind or slip past. A dynamic cover system lets the player crouch behind obstacles during a fight.

  Quiet stretches matter just as much, and they are often filled with conversation between the characters. Some simple puzzles use the environment. Ellie cannot swim, so floating pallets carry her across water, and ladders and dumpsters help reach higher ground. Notes, maps, and comics can be found and read later in the backpack menu.

  The human enemies have an artificial intelligence system built to react to combat. Once they discover the player, they may take cover or call for help. They can also take advantage of a player who is distracted, out of ammunition, or already in a fight. Companions such as Ellie help too. She can throw objects to stun threats, call out enemies the player cannot see, and attack with a knife and pistol.

  An online mode called Factions lets up to eight players compete in rearranged versions of single-player settings. Players choose between the Hunters, a group of hostile survivors, and the Fireflies, and each match counts as one day. Surviving twelve "weeks" completes a journey and lets players pick a faction again. Three match types exist. Supply Raid and Survivors are team deathmatches, with Survivors removing respawns, while Interrogation is a race to capture the enemy team's lockbox. Players earn parts by marking or killing enemies, healing or reviving allies, and crafting, then spend them mid-match on upgrades and armor. Players could once link a Facebook account so clan members took the names and faces of their friends. The PlayStation 3 servers for this mode shut down on the 3rd of September 2019.

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• 5. Built Around Two People

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  In 2009, with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves behind it, Naughty Dog did something it had never done before and split into two teams. One team made Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, released in 2011. The other began The Last of Us under game director Bruce Straley and creative director Neil Druckmann.

  Druckmann's idea went back to his university days. He imagined the gameplay of Ico, released in 2001, set in a zombie apocalypse like the one in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, from 1968. The lead would resemble John Hartigan from the comic series Sin City. In that early version, the lead was a police officer protecting a young girl, and his heart condition meant players would often take control of the girl instead. Druckmann later reworked the idea into this story. He sees the game as a coming-of-age tale in which Ellie learns to survive after time with Joel. He also sees it as a test of how far a father will go to save his child.

  The infected came from television. A segment of the BBC nature documentary Planet Earth, from 2006, showed Cordyceps fungi. They mainly infect insects, seizing control of their motor functions to help the fungus grow. The team asked what would happen if the fungus evolved to infect people, and what an outbreak would then look like.

  The relationship between Joel and Ellie came first, and every other element was developed around it. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson played the pair through voice and motion capture, and they helped shape the characters. Baker persuaded Druckmann that loneliness would make Joel care for Tess. Johnson persuaded him that Ellie should be stronger and more defensive. After comparisons to the actor Elliot Page, Ellie was redesigned to better reflect Johnson's personality and to look younger.

  Other characters changed too. Tess was first meant to be the main antagonist, but the team found her motives hard to believe. Bill's script had left his sexuality vague, and it was later altered to reflect that he is gay.

  Game designer Ricky Cambier named Ico and Resident Evil 4 as influences. He wanted to take the character building and interaction of the first and blend it with the tension and action of the second. The team built new engines to serve this goal. The artificial intelligence was designed to coordinate with the player, and adding Ellie as an AI companion drove much of that work. The lighting engine was rebuilt to handle soft light, with sunlight seeping through gaps and bouncing off surfaces.

  The game was announced on the 10th of December 2011 at the Spike Video Game Awards, alongside its debut trailer. Journalists linked the wave of anticipation to Naughty Dog's reputation. It missed its projected release date of the 7th of May 2013 and moved to the 14th of June 2013 for further polishing.

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• 6. Sound and Ruin

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  Gustavo Santaolalla was contacted early in development. He was known for minimalist compositions, and he brought that approach to the score. He used a range of instruments, including some he did not know well, which gave the music a sense of both danger and innocence. The same restraint guided the sound and art design.

  The sound of the infected was among the first tasks the team took on, and they experimented to get it right. For the Clicker, a type of infected, they hired the voice actress Misty Lee. Audio lead Phillip Kovats described the sound she produced as coming from the "back of the throat."

  The art department drew on outside work. Robert Polidori's photographs taken after Hurricane Katrina served as a reference for the flooded areas of Pittsburgh. Inside the studio, strong opinions collided. Straley and Druckmann leaned toward simplicity, and the art team leaned toward detail, so the artists had to negotiate for what they wanted to include. The team settled on a balance between the two. The opening credits were produced by Sony's San Diego Studio.

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• 7. The Verdict

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  Metacritic, the review aggregator, recorded "universal acclaim" for The Last of Us, making it the fifth-highest-rated PlayStation 3 game on the site. Colin Moriarty of IGN called it "a masterpiece" and "PlayStation 3's best exclusive." Edge described it as "the most riveting, emotionally resonant story-driven epic" of the console generation. Oli Welsh of Eurogamer saw "a beacon of hope" for survival horror.

  The characters drew the warmest words. Matt Helgeson of Game Informer found the bond between Joel and Ellie "poignant" and "well drawn." Philip Kollar of Polygon found Ellie believable and said the optional conversations strengthened the connection. Reviewers also praised the performances.

  Not everyone was won over. Some critics said the artificial intelligence hurt the combat, with enemies often ignoring the player's companions. Kollar thought the fights could be unfair, especially against the infected. Tom Mc Shea of GameSpot called the ruined world "mundane" because it had been portrayed so many times before. Paul Sartori of The Guardian saw the infection story as a trope, but he credited the game for focusing on characters instead of explaining it.

  The violence sparked its own debate. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku called it "heavy, consequential and necessary," and Joystiq's Richard Mitchell wrote that it was "designed to be uncomfortable." Many reviewers argued it never felt gratuitous.

  The treatment of women divided opinion more sharply. Jason Killingsworth of Edge praised the lack of sexualized female characters. Ellie Gibson of Eurogamer called Ellie "sometimes strong, sometimes vulnerable, but never a cliché." Chris Suellentrop of The New York Times disagreed in part. He argued the game is "actually the story of Joel" and "another video game by men, for men and about men." The American organization GLAAD named Bill one of the "most intriguing new LGBT characters of 2013."

  Sales were fast. Within seven days of release the game sold over 1.3 million copies, the biggest video game launch of 2013 at that point. After three weeks it passed 3.4 million. It sold six million copies in its first year and stayed at the top of the United Kingdom charts for six consecutive weeks. By April 2018 it had sold 17 million copies across two consoles. By May 2019 the total passed 20 million, with 8.4 million on PlayStation 3 and 11.79 million on PlayStation 4.

  Awards followed. Metacritic and GameRankings ranked it the second-highest-rated game of 2013, behind Grand Theft Auto V. It won at the 41st Annie Awards, the 10th British Academy Video Games Awards, the 17th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, and the 14th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Naughty Dog collected Studio of the Year honors from several outlets. Baker and Johnson both won acting awards, and the story took prizes from ceremonies including the Writers Guild of America Awards.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 2014, a fan named Grant Voegtle published a cinematic trailer for The Last of Us, followed in 2015 by playthroughs edited like a television series on YouTube. He wanted people who do not play games to experience the story. Naughty Dog and Druckmann praised the work, and Voegtle was soon hired as a video editor at the studio.

  The game itself kept growing. The Last of Us: Left Behind, released as downloadable material on the 14th of February 2014, follows Ellie and her friend Riley across two storylines. It reached a standalone release on the 12th of May 2015. A kiss between two female characters in it drew positive reactions. The Last of Us Remastered, announced on the 9th of April 2014, reached the PlayStation 4 that July and August. It used the DualShock 4 touchpad for inventory and the light bar to signal health. It also added Photo Mode and cutscene commentary from Druckmann, Baker, and Johnson. Critics welcomed it, and Polygon's Kollar compared it to a director's cut.

  A full remake, The Last of Us Part I, arrived on PlayStation 5 on the 2nd of September 2022 and on Windows on the 28th of March 2023. Matthew Gallant served as game director and Shaun Escayg as creative director. The team rebuilt the game for the new hardware and worked with Descriptive Video Works on audio descriptions for cutscenes. Many journalists and players called the remake unnecessary, and the Windows version became Naughty Dog's lowest-rated game.

  The influence reached other studios. The developers of God of War, from 2018, and A Plague Tale: Innocence, from 2019, named it as an inspiration for their focus on characters. In May 2023 it entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play. The following month, journalists called the Nintendo Switch title The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival a "clone" and "rip-off" of it. Its trailers were removed from YouTube after a copyright claim from Sony, and by August the game was gone from the Nintendo eShop.

  The franchise spread into other media. Dark Horse Comics published the four-issue miniseries The Last of Us: American Dreams from April to July 2013, written by Druckmann and illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks. In July 2014 the cast performed selected scenes live in Santa Monica, California, with Santaolalla playing the music. The Last of Us Part II reached the PlayStation 4 in June 2020. A feature film written by Druckmann stalled in development, and an animated short was canceled by Sony. Druckmann and Craig Mazin instead made a television series starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, which debuted on HBO and HBO Max in January 2023.

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