The online discourse surrounding The Last of Usseason two was entrenched in unwarranted outrage, sparked by outrage over the show’s centering a gay love story and killing off the franchise’s leading man. The trolling, which resulted in the show getting review bombed, of course, is weird considering that both these major plot aspects are also present in Neil Druckmann’s series of Naughty Dog games.
Recently Bella Ramsey, the show’s Emmy Award-nominated lead (alongside Pedro Pascal), discussed with The Awardist podcast their reaction to the reactive rage-baiters who took issue with Ellie’s lesbian relationship.
“Because there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. The show is out. There’s nothing that can be changed or altered. So I’m like, there’s not really any point in reading or looking at anything,” Ramsey shared. “People are, of course, entitled to their opinions. But it doesn’t affect the show; it doesn’t affect how the show continues or anything in any way. They’re very separate things to me. So no, I just don’t really engage.”
Ramsey addressed how that vocal minority of vile-spewing can sincerely excuse themselves from engaging with season three, which will see showrunner Craig Mazin, helming solo after Druckmann stepped back, follow the show’s antagonist Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who killed Joel (Pascal). The story twist has been around since it debuted in the game, but it still continues to divide The Last of Us fandom and shock casual show viewers during season two.
The shift in leading characters will delve into Abby’s world to inform her worldview. How Ellie comes into play is under wraps but Ramsey affirmed that they hope haters steer clear if they won’t approach the story with an open mind: “You don’t have to watch it. If you hate it that much, the game exists. You can just play the game again. If you do want to watch it, hope you enjoy it.”
We might have to wait a while to see it, but tonight HBO gave us our first good look at The Last of Us‘ return in action, and it looks like we’re in for a world of hurt.
Released as part of an extended tease of what’s coming in the next year during House of the Dragon‘s season finale tonight (stay tuned for our recap tomorrow!) the new footage is short, but offers some interesting hints at what the sophomore season will adapt from the award-winning Naughty Dog sequel.
The footage offers not just new glimpses of what Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s Joel and Ellie are up to (having a bad time, for the most part), but glimpses at new and returning major characters, including Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), what appears to be our first glimpses at Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), Dina (Isabela Merced), and Jeffrey Wright reprising his role as Isaac from the game. We also get our first glimpse at Catharine O’Hara’s mysterious new figure, who asks Joel an intriguing question, seemingly about Ellie: “Did you hurt her?”
Check out the full HBO/Max tease below, which also includes new footage from The Penguin, Dune: Prophecy, It: Welcome to Derry, and our first actual look at the next Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, in action.
Multiversus, the Warner Bros. crossover platform fighter starring Batman, Shaggy, Arya Stark and more, is out for real this time after going into a year-long hibernation. Now that it’s back and out of beta, the fighting game community is assessing if it could have the longevity of fighting games like Super Smash Bros. And some have already realized that smaller local tournaments, which often keep the game’s scene alive, could have trouble running Multiversus. That’s because, one significant change to the free-to-play model may make it prohibitively expensive to host Multiversus tournaments. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Sony is currently running a pretty awesome sale for a number of its first-party games, particularly those in the action genre. Whether you’re looking to check out Nathan Drake’s swan song in Uncharted 4, Sam Porter Bridges’ strange trip through the apocalypse in Death Stranding, or Kratos’ dramatic shift into sad dad mode in 2018’s God of War, there’s a ton here to check out.
Most of these deals are for PS4 versions, many of which you can upgrade to the PS5 version either for free or at a small cost. All of these deals run from now until April 1, 2024.
We also threw in a list of action-adjacent games you may wish to check out as well.
Anyone who was on the internet around the release of The Last of Us Part II knows it was a bad time. But while we, as fans and writers, saw the vitriolic backlash unfold in real-time, it was far worse for the creative team who was directly targeted by it. Laura Bailey, who played the secret second protagonist Abby, has opened up about her experience with harassment during the game’s release cycle, and how some disgruntled fans threatened her son, who was two years old at the time, because they didn’t like her character.
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If you haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Abby kills Joel, the protagonist of the first game, as part of a years-long revenge plot for the death of her father. A subset of fans famously lashed out about this, viewing it as a “betrayal” of sorts by developer Naughty Dog. This backlash extended to the cast of the game, including Bailey. In the documentary Grounded II: The Making of The Last of Us Part II that premiered on February 2, Bailey tearfully spoke about death threats that she received.
Some of these messages were passed along to proper channels to ensure that Bailey wasn’t in any immediate danger, and among them were threats directed at her son, who was born during Part II’s development. In a segment of the documentary focused on the backlash surrounding leaked cutscenes ahead of launch, Bailey says this taught her to “keep a distance” from the public.
Bailey talked publicly about the online abuse she received around the launch of The Last of Us Part II back in 2020, and even posted screenshots of some of what was sent her way. This included one message that was directed at her son and parents. This level of harassment has become so commonplace in the video game industry, and public-facing women in the space are most often the target. Just earlier this year, Spider-Man 2 face model Stephanie Tyler Jones had to speak out against people stalking her by leaving voicemails at her day job and making her feel “unsafe.”
Seeing how people treated Bailey for playing a character she didn’t write naturally makes me worry about how The Last of Us fans will react to Kaitlyn Dever, who will play Abby in the HBO Max live-action adaptation, once the golf club comes down. A lot of people have jokingly said she needs to get off social media now, but looking at how awful the response was to Bailey, maybe it’s worthwhile advice.
The Grounded II documentary presents a behind-the-scenes look at The Last of Us Part II’s development and includes a soft confirmation that Naughty Dog has a concept in mind for a third game.
Two weeks ago, news broke that actor Kaitlyn Dever was joining the cast for the second season of HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series—which is still floating along without a release date, with “some time in 2025” the best anybody in TV land can guess. But despite that mild ambiguity, Dever’s casting kicked off a small firestorm of speculation, because it was revealed that she’d be playing a character named Abby Anderson when she joined the Emmy-winning video-game adaptation’s second season—which means The Last Of Us is almost certainly diving whole hog into the story of 2020’s The Last Of Us Part II. And that means things are about to get … messy.
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[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for 2020 video gameThe Last Of Us Part II—and, likely, for at least some of the plot elements of the still-filming second season of HBO’s The Last Of UsTV show.]
Because while the critical consensus on Part II has mostly calmed down in the four years since its release—give or take some moderate consternation lately at the fact that Sony has already rolled out a “remastered” version of the hardly retro game, out last week–the game was something of a lightning rod when it first came out. Some of that wasn’t developer Naughty Dog’s fault. (A high-profile leak from the game’s development, showcasing several cutscenes and character models, fired up the kinds of chuds who get angry when female video-game characters aren’t “feminine” enough, to pick one of the more vitriolic examples.) But some of it was in direct to response to the game’s big narrative swings, which were, depending on who you asked, either “bold” or “super-aggressive and kind of manipulative.”
Many of which, we have to assume, will now be inherited by its TV adaptation: Excepting its critically heralded third episode, Craig Mazin’s adaptation of the first game into the show’s first season was almost overwhelmingly faithful–down to the season’s final scene almost exactly mimicking both the dialogue, and the staging, of the game’s famous ending. With game series creative director Neil Druckmann on board for the second season, as he was for the first, it would be shocking to see the series diverge more than a few inches from established canon.
What does that all mean? A few things—all of which could make The Last Of Us’ second season a very weird run of TV.
The Pedro Pascal “issue”
Pedro Pascal, Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
Anyone hoping to avoid spoilers for either the game series, or the show’s next season, should hop off this train now, because there’s really no way to talk about either without addressing the fungus-encrusted elephant in the room: protagonist Joel Miller’s sudden death, an hour or so into The Last Of Us Part II.
Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel on the show, has, understandably, hedged a bit when asked about this plot element–because how could he not? (Nobody wants the HBO Spoiler Squad on their ass.) But The Last Of Us Part II really doesn’t function as a story without it: Joel’s sudden death, at the hands of a group of survivors who come to the almost ludicrously idyllic community where he and Ellie (Bella Ramsay) have been living out their post-apocalypse, is rooted in both the aftermath of the first game and the narrative obsessions of the second. Everything The Last Of Us Part II wants to say about humanity–and it wants to say a lot—grows out of that early moment of sudden, shocking brutality, one moment of horrifying trauma birthed directly from another.
This was controversial, to say the least, in the games, where Joel was a beloved character played by well-liked voice actor Troy Baker. Applying it to a rising/risen star like Pascal—who did so much work to build a beautiful, broken human out of some fairly stock parts with his performance as Joel in the show’s first season–might be even more disruptive. Pascal and Ramsay both came up through Game Of Thrones, of course, so neither is unfamiliar with being on a series that jettisoned its “star” at a critical early point. But seeing the show’s most marketable star go the way of Logan Roy one episode into its new season is still likely to leave fans a bit discombobulated.
The absolute brutality of Ellie Williams
Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
If the above paragraphs didn’t clue you in, The Last Of Us Part II is an aggressively grim game. Even its genuine moments of love or levity come with the unavoidable knowledge that something truly awful is right around the corner—and rarely in the form of something as simple as a rampaging fungus monster. That goes doubly true for the character of Ellie, who came of age in the first game/season—and who spends the second game having her last few shreds of innocence sliced off of her piece by piece.
And really, we’re looking forward to seeing what Ramsay, who was excellent in the first season, will do with this material, as Ellie becomes harder and harder, and harder and harder to root for, the further into her need for vengeance she descends. But it’s going to be a lot for audiences, even by the standards of HBO: We’ll be curious to see if the TV show stays true to the moment that would, in a less ugly narrative, be Ellie’s rock bottom—i.e., the confrontation with Mel, for game players—or if it’ll back away from quite that level of character-alienating horror. But either way, we’ll likely depart the show’s second season with very little idea of who, if anyone, we want to see getting what they want out of this broken and miserable world.
A question of perspective
Pedro Pascal, Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
There’s also a question of structure to be addressed here, requiring us to spoil The Last Of Us Part II’s other big twist: the fact that only about half of the game is played from Ellie’s perspective, with the game rewinding at a major turning point to show what its three violent days in Seattle have been like for Joel’s killer, Abby.
On the one hand, this might actually be easier for the TV show to handle than the game; one of The Last Of Us franchise’s big tricks is adapting techniques from film and media, where they’re less familiar, to the medium of games, and this kind of perspective flip is far closer to old hat for television. That being said, the parts of the game where you play as Abby constitute a huge portion of the game, introducing new characters, stories, motivations, and problems, all to drill in for players that she’s just as much a person, a “protagonist,” as Ellie herself. A 24-hour-long video game can take that kind of time to make its points—a nine-hour TV series, not so much. It’s key to Druckmann’s vision of The Last Of Us Part II that Abby feel as “real” to the player/viewer as Joel or Ellie did. Building that kind of identification, without feeling repetitive or digressive, is going to be a fascinating struggle for the show to handle in a fraction of the time.
Is there room for another “Long, Long Time”?
Nick Offerman, Murray BartlettPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
As we noted above, the first season of The Last Of Us deviated from the game’s plot in only one serious regard—and was rewarded powerfully for it, with critics and viewers alike holding up that digression point, “Long, Long Time” as a series highlight. With Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett moving mountains to flesh out characters who were, in the game, an asshole and a corpse, respectively, the episode served as a necessary antidote to the grimness of the rest of the season, reminding viewers that there was still the possibility of life, even for “the last of us.”
Mazin, and writer Peter Hoar, could fit that material into the series in part because they were adapting a largely episodic narrative: The first Last Of Us plays out as a series of vignettes as much as it is a more cohesive story, and it was fairly simple to swap out the running and shooting of the game’s “Bill’s Town” segment for something with considerably more heart. Just as importantly, it demonstrated at least some justification for the entire show, dialing into quieter, more human moments, at a distance from Joel and Ellie’s story.
The Last Of Us Part II is a much tighter narrative ship, though, with a big chunk of its power coming from the way it buries you in first Ellie and then Abby’s head. And so it remains to be seen where Mazin and his team can find room for a bit of light to shine through. (Even if you zoom out of the Ellie-Abby conflict, the game’s background plot is about a brutal inter-clan war waged between military despots on the one hand and transphobic religious zealots on the other; there’s not a lot of room for gentler shading there.) We suspect that the Abby material will have to stand in for that kind of digression, but her story is so married and mirrored to Ellie’s that it’ll be difficult to get meaningful breathing room out of it.
All that being said: It’s worth stepping back and remembering that we’re talking about a TV show that hasn’t even been filmed at this point, let alone aired. Speculation can only go so far before it just becomes fortune-telling and just as useful. But The Last Of Us’ nature as an adaptation—and one especially beholden to its source material—invites these kinds of questions. The Last Of Us Part II landed like a bomb in 2020, detonating video-game discourse for months around it. We can only imagine what its adaptation to television will do when it arrives some time next year.
In a new press release from audio electronics company Altec Lansing, it was revealed that GameShark is returning, sort of via an artificial intelligence-powered successor called “AI Shark” You don’t care about that. Instead, the big news out of this press release is that it might have leaked the release date for the Nintendo Switch 2. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
The Last of Us Online is dead. Naughty Dog announced today that the multiplayer spin-off of the hit series is no longer in development, citing concerns about managing ongoing content for a live-service game while still trying to produce the single-player blockbusters the PlayStation studio is famous for.
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“We realize many of you have been anticipating news around the project that we’ve been calling The Last of Us Online,” Naughty Dog wrote in a December 14 update. “There’s no easy way to say this: We’ve made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on that game.”
The studio said that as production on the project ramped up, it became clear that “we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games.” The choices were apparently between becoming a “solely live-service games studio” in the mold of modern day Bungie, which makes Destiny 2, or “continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.”
The Last Of Us Online, which many many fans previously referred to as Factions after the multiplayer mode from the original 2013 PlayStation 3 game, was first announced during Summer Game Fest 2022. The spin-off was billed as the studio’s “biggest online experience” ever, and as large as any of its single-player games.
But Naughty Dog never showed the game beyond vague statements and concept art. Then in May of this year, Bloomberg reported that the production team on the game had be scaled back following negative feedback from an internal review by Bungie, which Sony acquired last year. At the time, the studio posted a statement on Twitter saying that while things were progressing well, the game required more time. By October, however, Kotaku reported that the project had been “put on ice” amid some internal reshuffling and dozens of contracted developers being laid off.
The Last of Us Online was one of a number of new multiplayer projects in development across Sony’s studios as the PlayStation 5 maker invested in a massive shift toward more live-service games. In November, Sony revealed during an earnings call that half of the roughly dozen online games it was working on would be delayed past 2025.
In the meantime, Naughty Dog is still working on a “brand-new single-player game” it plans to reveal sometime in the future.
We realize many of you have been anticipating news around the project that we’ve been calling The Last of Us Online. There’s no easy way to say this: We’ve made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on that game.
We know this news will be tough for many, especially our dedicated The Last of Us Factions community, who have been following our multiplayer ambitions ardently. We’re equally crushed at the studio as we were looking forward to putting it in your hands. We wanted to share with you some background of how we came to this decision.
The multiplayer team has been in pre-production with this game since we were working on The Last of Us Part II – crafting an experience we felt was unique and had tremendous potential. As the multiplayer team iterated on their concept for The Last of Us Online during this time, their vision crystalized, the gameplay got more refined and satisfying, and we were enthusiastic about the direction in which we were headed.
In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear. To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.
We are immensely proud of everyone at the studio that touched this project. The learnings and investments in technology from this game will carry into how we develop our projects and will be invaluable in the direction we are headed as a studio. We have more than one ambitious, brand new single player game that we’re working on here at Naughty Dog, and we cannot wait to share more about what comes next when we’re ready.
Until then, we’re incredibly thankful to our community for your support throughout the years.
Gamers are a passionate bunch, and we’re no exception. These are the week’s most interesting perspectives on the wild, wonderful, and sometimes weird world of video game news.
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Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the new animated series based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels, is out on Netflix. The eight-episode series reunites the voice cast of the 2010 live-action movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and is a hilarious blend of the series’ quick wit and well-measured pop culture references. All of this sounds like a recipe for success, right? Well, it’s a little more complicated. Read More
Ubisoft’s new The Divisiongame isn’t even out yet, as it’s still in beta testing and won’t launch officially until 2024. But after trying the beta, I already want one feature from the upcoming game to become standard in every video game I play in the future. Read More
OpenAI is the research organization behind ChatGPT, the AI-generated chatbot that took the internet by storm last year for its capacity to have really weird conversations with tech journalists. It’s at the center of Microsoft’s big bet on generative AI tools transforming the world, gaming, and more, and it’s now at risk of imploding after its CEO, Sam Altman, was mysteriously ousted by the OpenAI board of directors and Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear was desperately recruited to replace him. Here’s all you really need to know about OpenAI to appreciate what a clusterfuck the last few days have been. Read More
How much time has to pass before it becomes acceptable to remaster or even remake a game? 10 years? 15 years? What about three-ish years? Is that enough time between the original and the remaster? Well, that’s what’s happening early next year as Naughty Dog is remastering 2020’s The Last of Us Part II.Read More
Image: Kotaku / Asier Romero / Luis Molinero (Shutterstock)
Whenever a new blockbuster first-person shooter drops, gamers limber up so they can once again argue over how multiplayer matches get made and the algorithmic systems that determine who plays against whom and when. The recent release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is no exception—not long after its multiplayer servers booted on November 10, players began flocking to Reddit, X (Twitter), and everywhere in between to complain about the quality (or perceived lack thereof) of Activision’s matchmaking. But, as with so many issues in the gaming industry, there’s a serious lack of nuance and true understanding at play here. Read More
Remember when it took us seven years to get a new The Last of Us game? Remember when there was even a question about whether or not we’d ever get a sequel to Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic action game because the ending was so intentionally ambiguous and thought-provoking?
Now, it seems we can’t go a year without being reminded that Sony thinks as many people should experience this series as possible, while folks associated with the HBO adaptation praise the game in ways that border on the absurd. Now, we’re getting a remaster of The Last of Us Part II, and it feels like we’re reaching peak Last of Us fatigue. Read More
Update 11/17/2023 7:55 p.m. ET: Naughty Dog’s officially confirmed the existence of The Last of Us Part II Remastered, releasing a barrage of information about the upcoming re-release of its 2020 PlayStation 4 game in a post on its website, complete with an announcement trailer.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the remaster will be the new roguelike “No Return” mode, which sounds very involved. You choose a character and then try to survive in “randomized encounters”—it’s not clear if actual maps are randomized—and surviving lets you win meta-progression to enhance your character’s abilities, unlock cosmetics, and compete on global daily challenge leaderboards.
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“Remastered” implies improved A/V aspects. The new release will indeed take advantage of the PlayStation 5’s enhanced capabilities, giving you the usual choice of a 4K “Fidelity” mode or a 1440p-upscaled-to-4K “Performance” mode that runs at 60fps. Whichever mode you choose, the game will look better in general thanks to variable refresh rate support, improved LoD settings, sharper textures, smoother animation rates, and so on. DualSense controller features like adaptive triggers will be leveraged, too.
As is its tendency, Naughty Dog is also going big on behind-the-scenes features, with a wild-sounding amount of commentary from various creatives, including voice actors, and several new “lost levels” that will let you play through areas that were cut from the original Part II release.
You can also expect an array of smaller additions, including a speedrun challenge mode, improved photo-taking functionality, bonus skins for various characters, and expanded guitar playing that will expand the sound possibilities and let you stage impromptu little concerts in different venues.
Image: Naughty Dog
Pre-orders open December 5. If you’d like to spend more money, a pricier The Last of Us Part II Remastered W.L.F. Edition will come in a SteelBook case and include four enamel pins, a clothing patch, and physical versions of 47 trading cards from inside the game. And in nice news for existing PS4 Part II owners, you can upgrade to the digital version of Remastered for $10.
On November 17, a reputed listing for the yet-to-be-confirmed remaster was leaked online. The new remastered The Last of Us sequel will seemingly feature “native PS5 enhancements,” including a “a host of graphical improvements” and faster loading times.
The store listing also mentions “No Return” which is described as a “roguelike survival mode experience.” Here’s the full description of that apparent new mode:
Survive as long as you can in each run, as you choose your path through a series of randomized encounters. Play as a host of different unlockable characters, some never-before playable in The Last of Us franchise, each with unique gameplay traits. The variety of challenges feature different foes and memorable locations from throughout Part II, all culminating in tense boss battles.
This remastered edition of The Last of Us Part II will also feature “Lost Levels” that will let players explore “early-development versions” of levels not seen in the main game. Some other interesting tidbits from the store listing include:
Hours of new developer commentary.
A new mode that lets you play the famous guitar minigame freely.
A speedrun-focused mode
New unlockable weapon and character skins for Abby and Ellie.
This new remaster will seemingly be exclusive to PS5 and launches on January 19, 2024. The leaked trailer and store listing didn’t make mention of a PC port.
This leak seemingly confirms rumors and reports from earlier this year about a The Last of Us Part II remaster or PS5 upgrade. Back in July 2023, Last of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla suggested during an interview that an upgraded port of some kind was in the works.
I liked Crash Team Rumble. I even said as much on this very website when the brawler MOBA launched back in June. But man, seeing them add Spyro, Crash’s flying, fire-breathing, OG PlayStation platformer contemporary to the roster just makes me wish we had a new Spyro the Dragon game.
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Spyro is set to join Crash, Catbat, and many of the bandicoot’s other friends and foes in Crash Team Rumble when its third season, titled All Fired Up, launches on December 7. The purple dragon joins Ripto (one of the series’ villains, who was strangely added before the hero himself in the second season) as a guest character, alongside Elora, the guiding fawn companion from the original trilogy. Not much is known about how Spyro will play, but it’s curious that Crash Team Rumble has been adding Spyro crossover characters, music, and cosmetics two seasons in a row, huh?
My hope is that this is more than just lip service and that publisher Activision is actually planning to make a substantive Spyro announcement in the near future. Back in September, rumors of a fourth mainline Spyro game circulated on sites like Reddit, but the specifics of the alleged leak, such as an October reveal and Spyro Reignited Trilogy remake artist Nicholas Kole being attached to the project, were debunked. As fun as Crash Team Rumble is, it’s not the Crash Bandicoot or Spyro game I want, and I know that sentiment rings true for a lot of fans.
Even if Crash Team Rumble isn’t what fans are looking for, Activision has been investing pretty heavily into Crash Bandicoot since it had a soft reboot with the Crash N. Sane Trilogy in 2017. That collection remade Naughty Dog’s first three Crash games for modern systems, then Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled followed in 2019. Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, a brand-new platformer, launched in 2020, and was a really solid, challenging spin on the original formula.
Spyro the Dragon, meanwhile, has been getting scraps in this wave of OG PlayStation platformer love. The Reignited Trilogy brought his original three Insomniac-made games to modern systems with a new coat of paint in 2018, but it’s been 15 years since the last brand-new Spyro game. The little purple guy has pretty much been relegated to a crossover cameo here and there in Crash Bandicoot games.
I grew up on these games, and even if the mascot platformer has mostly gone out of vogue, I would still play a Spyro or Sly Cooper game in 2023. But while companies love to throw little references and crossovers into current games, that rarely leads to a new game. Spyro has been showing up in Crash’s adventures for years now, and with each passing year that he doesn’t get his own comeback game, these crossovers feel more and more like a carrot on a stick, leading nowhere.
I’ll still probably boot up Crash Team Rumble to play Spyro, though. So guess I should put on my clown makeup.
Sony’s big press conference at E3 2006 rapidly became the stuff of legend. Awkward, baffling, hilarious, and stilted all at once, the presser—which touted the PSP and revealed the price point for the PlayStation 3—was easily one of the company’s most memorable, albeit unintentionally so, spawning an early, viral YouTube video memeing its most absurd moments, as well as other widespread mockery. And now, thanks to the preservation work of documentarian Danny O’Dwyer, you can watch the broadcast in stunning 4K.
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Through his crowdfunded documentary channel Noclip, O’Dwyer has been slowly digging up and publishing decades of video game history. From gameplay of unreleased titles to a scrapped 10-year-old Hideo Kojima interview to never-before-seen trailers, he’s got it all. And on July 21, he uploaded Sony’s two-hour E3 2006 presentation in the highest possible quality: 2160p at 60fps. Y’all, this is a time capsule worth watching for the first time if you’ve never seen it,, or reliving in HD if you have. Trust me, you’re in for a great time. So strap in, and let’s briefly remember this silly conference.
Noclip Game History Archive
The presentation had some cool games
There were some pretty cool games shown during the presentation. Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, the fifth entry in the now-dormant third-person stealth-shooter series, was featured, along with PS3 launch title Genji: Days of the Blade. The best God of War clone, Heavenly Sword, was revealed with some cinematic gameplay. And we got our first look at what would become Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a game that would go on to introduce one of Naughty Dog’s most iconic IPs. On the games front, Sony’s E3 2006 press conference was serving it up, period.
The awkward moments were memeable
But in between these gameplay demos and teaser trailers were some truly stilted moments. Then-president and CEO Kaz Hirai trying to hype the crowd up by yelling, “It’s Riiiidge Racer!” The Genji: Days of the Blade presenter touting the game’s historical roots before fighting a giant enemy crab with a weak point you could strike for massive damage. Some random guy on the street talking about how it’s going to hurt when he beats you in PS3 games because “I don’t know.” It was a bonkers presentation that was as legendary as it was hilarious.
Donovansan
The price of the PlayStation 3 was a ‘yikes’
While the presentation opened with the high of Hirai talking about the fantastic success of the PS2, the best-selling console of all time, the ending was a serious dud. After all this boasting about the previous generation and showing off dope games for the next, Hirai revealed the PS3’s price: $500 for a 20GB console and $600 for a 60GB one. The announcement went over like a ton of bricks, perhaps in part due to the fact that the Xbox 360, already on the market for months, was considerably cheaper. It was a baffling price point that left me gagging, but the PS3 still wound up selling slightly more units than the Xbox 360 across its lifespan.
Saving footage that could have been lost forever
In an email to Kotaku, O’Dwyer detailed the work that went into uploading this memorable press conference. Saved on two HDCAM tapes by a video game website and bound for the landfill before O’Dwyer rescued them, he said that he “did basically nothing” to the footage, merely ripped it from the tapes and converted it to HD.
“The process is pretty simple, we use a professional HDCAM tape deck to pull the signal from [Series Digital Interface (SDI)],” O’Dwyer said. “I used a converter to swap that to HDMI and use a high-grade capture device to record that. Once I have it on a PC, I export a 4k version for YouTube (to access the higher bitrates available) and a 1080p version for archive as that’s its native resolution and we can upload the file to archive without it being re-rendered.”
Noclip
Asked why he thought Sony’s E3 2006 presentation became so notorious, O’Dwyer theorized that because memes were a lot rarer back then, it was easy for phrases as simple as “Riiiidge Racer” and “giant enemy crab” to live rent-free in our heads. Whatever the forces behind it, conferences like these are among the coolest pieces of video game history he’s stumbled upon since embarking on preserving the “few thousand tapes” that were almost lost forever.
Speaking of other favorites, O’Dwyer said, “The Nintendo Spaceworld demo is another because it’s such a beloved piece of footage that nobody had a clean copy of,” O’Dwyer said. “My personal favorite may be the Knights of the Old Republic E3 demo that had never been seen before. Especially given where that franchise is.” [A remake announced in September 2021 has been indefinitely delayed.] “I know that fandom has loved dissecting that video. A few days ago, I found a cache of E3 2004 press kits full of screenshots and videos, too. So every day we stumble on exciting new stuff.”
What O’Dwyer is doing is incredibly important work. Considering that 87 percent of classic games are being lost to time, mostly because old hardware is difficult to find and hard to maintain, there’s some comfort in knowing that there are folks out there working to preserve video game history. Because if we don’t remember where we’ve been, we can’t ever know where we’re going.
Remember that awful looking The Last of Us clone, The Last Hope, that got released earlier this month? Well, it turns out the game is much worse than the trailer first suggested. Apparently, the whole game is only about 20 minutes long, takes place in one street, and is a broken mess.
The Top 10 Most-Played Games On Steam Deck: June 2023 Edition
Let’s cast our minds back to last week. That’s when a horrible-looking Nintendo Switch The Last of Us clone went viral online. A trailer for the game looked like a blatant copy of Naughty Dog’s award-winning franchise, complete with its own Ellie-like companion. It was even called The Last Hope. Yeah, the people who made it weren’t being subtle about where they were pulling their “inspiration” from. Most would agree, it looked bad, but now thanks to Digital Foundry, it’s clear this is much worse than we thought. In fact, it might be the worst game of 2023.
In a new upload on Thursday, the video game tech analysts at Digital Foundry ripped The Last Hope apart in a video that is about as long as the actual game.
Digital Foundry / West Connection Limited / VG Games
Where to even begin? For starters—this might be the most shocking—the entire game seems to take place mainly on one U-shaped street in a generic city. Thanks to the game’s reliance on Unity store props, it’s a rather confusing place. American flags can be seen next to European power outlets. Other assets also don’t seem to work together, with some being far too detailed compared to other, lower-res objects scattered about.
Playing The Last Hope is a frustrating, bad experience
When you actually start to play The Last Hope, you’ll also notice that the framerate is horrendous, often dipping well below 30. This makes it hard to play, as the game’s performance goes up and down constantly. What also makes it hard to play is that the game seems to have barely been playtested. As shown in the Digital Foundry video, it gives the player very limited resources.
For example, your stamina meter doesn’t recharge over time, limiting how many times you can swing your baseball bat. And there are only three MREs, that partially refill your stamina, in the entire game. Bullets are also rare, meaning that if you miss too many shots you could end up in an unwinnable situation.
At one part, players have to use a lockpick to unlock a police car, and while doing this you can be killed by zombies. The problem is the game doesn’t tell you this is happening. So you do your lockpicking, finish, and exit to a screen that simply states “You Dead.” This means that you’ll need to clear out the area of zombies before starting the lockpicking mini-game. But based on Digital Foundry’s math, you can only kill around 65 zombies with the resources offered in-game. So don’t miss a single shot, don’t sprint (as that wastes stamina), and also hope the game doesn’t randomly crash during all of this, erasing your progress in the process.
Oh and keep in mind that it’s only about 15 minutes long, assuming you manage your limited resources correctly and don’t get stuck trying to open a door that can only be opened with the “E” key. (Note: The Switch doesn’t have an E key.)
The Switch’s digital store is filled with this crap
And it’s easy to laugh at it, which I did and continue to do. But it’s sadly not an oddity on the Switch’s eShop, which in recent years has become filled with shovelware garbage that, some might say, is getting very close to scam territory. Not that I’m calling The Last Hope—a game that can be completed in 15 minutes and looks to be directly ripping off The Last of Us using poorly cobbled together Unity assets—a scam. Just, you know, some people might be saying that.
I think some folks just assume these shovelware games are bad and don’t think much of it. But I think Nintendo should try to bring back some quality control to its store.
For one, so many indie devs are working really hard on games that end up getting lost in a massive sea of content. Pruning some of the worst, most broken shovelware from the store might help these devs find more success. The Switch platform also has a lot of younger players and they or their parents might not know better and waste some money on something awful, broken, and terrible. Something like The Last Hope.
With the wind at their back, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan and head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst recently presented the state of the PlayStation 5 ecosystem to investors and hinted at what’s coming in the near future. Among other things, the company promised new IPs, more live-service games, and a big push behind cloud gaming.
Type S: Chiaki’s Journey II Volume 4
While Sony’s big gaming showcase will offer specific details on new game announcements, release dates, and potential hardware refreshes, the investor presentation was a broader look at the current state of the PlayStation business and where it’s headed next. We got a pretty granular breakdown of some interesting sales data as well as cryptic teases of upcoming initiatives, like Sony’s rumored cloud gaming handheld, Q Lite [Update 5/25/2023 11:07 a.m. ET: the devices was revealed in the showcase and it’s wild looking]. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the company’s latest business meeting.
PS VR2 is already outselling the first virtual reality headset
Sony’s new virtual reality headset is a comfortable but pricey bundle that requires users to already own a PS5, but initial sales numbers show it’s actually tracking ahead of the first PS VR headset. PS VR2 sold 600,000 units in its first six weeks, while the PS VR1 sold closer to 550,000. Whether that momentum will build the platform into something more than an expensive accessory for enthusiasts remains to be seen.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
Analysts previously called for a price cut to fuel sales, and it’s unclear if big new games will arrive without a larger install base, especially as companies like Meta lay off VR developers amid cutbacks.
Sony plans to invest a ton in new franchises
Since the PS5 launched, fans have been waiting to see what new IPs would grow out of the latest console generation. So far it’s been mostly sequels to series that already existed or got their start on the PS4 like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man. But Sony revealed that new franchises are planned. PlayStation Studios’ investment in new IP will hit 50 percent in 2025, compared to only 20 percent in 2019. However the lag in production means we might not end up seeing the results of that spending until late in the PS5’s life cycle.
Live-service games will be over half of that spending
Sony’s first-party single-player games have been setting the bar for story-driven blockbusters for years now, from The Last of Us to Ghost of Tsushima. It’s clear the company now wants to do the same for live-service multiplayer games as well, and will be leveraging its recent acquisition of Destiny 2 maker Bungie to achieve that.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
The breakdown of total spending on content this year will be 55 percent on live-service business models vs 45 percent on “traditional” ones. The difference will be even more stark by 2025, when live-service spending will reach 60 percent of seemingly all production costs. It’s possible some of those games will still have a traditional single-player emphasis and just include cosmetic shops, like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Others are sure to be multiplayer-focused affairs more like Destiny 2.
PS5 owners spend a ton on microtransactions
Prestigious exclusives might help sell consoles, but it’s not what makes the most money once players are locked in. Sony revealed that PS5 players are spending over $100 more than PS4 players were at a similar point in the console cycle. That extra money isn’t coming from more games sold, however. It’s coming from spending on add-on content, meaning paid DLC and microtransactions.
Full game sales actually dropped by 10 percent on the PS5, while add-on content grew by 210 percent. Although Sony collects a 30 percent commission on all in-game purchases in Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and Apex Legends on the platform, it would stand to make a ton more if those purchases were made inside its own first-party exclusives.
Spider-Man sold great on PC while The Last of Us Part I is off to a slower start
2018’s Spider-Man didn’t arrive on PC until last year. In the eight months since it hit PC, the game sold an additional 1.5 million copies on the platform. The Last of Us Part I, meanwhile, has sold 368,000 copies since it arrived on Steam in March. That’s not bad considering it’s a remaster of a decade-old game many people have already played on PS3, PS4, and PS5. But it’s not exactly God of War numbers, which sold nearly a million copies in its first two and a half months on PC.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It’s not clear how much The Last of Us Part I’s rough performance and poor optimization at launch hurt its initial momentum, compared to the overall increase in sales of the game across all platforms following the success of the hit HBO adaptation. It seems like the port was in part a learning exercise for Naughty Dog, potentially as Sony eyes bringing the rest of its games to PC.
Half of all game releases won’t just be on PS5 by 2025
In the past Sony seemed afraid to cannibalize console sales by releasing its games on PC. Now it’s clear the company is ready to do just the opposite, porting its exclusives and investing in potential mobile spin-offs. The company plans for 50 percent of its releases in 2025 to be either PC or mobile games.
A lot of players are paying for the more expensive PlayStation Plus subscriptions
When Sony unveiled its overhauled PS Plus program, creating three separate tiers and folding its PlayStation Now streaming service into the priciest one, it seemed needlessly complicated. The highest tier, Premium, also didn’t seem worth the extra price in exchange for a slim selection of PlayStation Classics and cloud gaming features that are still a work-in-progress.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It turns out a lot of people were willing to upgrade, however. Sony says 14.1 million subscribers joined the higher tiers in the first 10 months, which now represent 30 percent of all PS Plus users. And Premium actually accounts for the majority of those with 17 percent of total subscribers, while the middle-tier, Extra, only has 13 percent.
The first PlayStation mobile game will arrive as early as 2023
Sony said it’s currently “partnered with established teams on games,” and “bringing some of our most celebrated IP to mobile,” with the first set to release in fiscal year 2023. The company acquired mobile maker Savage Game Studios last August and Bungie has also long been rumored to be working on a mobile version of Destiny 2. According to Sony’s charts, the mobile gaming market is already bigger than console and PC gaming combined, and it only projects that gap to widen in the coming years.
Sony’s doubling-down on cloud gaming
In the most cryptic part of the presentation, CEO Jim Ryan said the company has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud.” He didn’t elaborate on what those are, but made the comment in the context of mobile gaming and portability. It certainly raises eyebrows since Sony has also now revealed a cloud gaming handheld codenamed Project Q that would be a remote play accessory for the PS5.
PS Plus also doesn’t currently support cloud gaming on smartphones either, requiring you to use a PS4, PS5, or PC. We do know that Sony has been developing a number of patents to decrease latency while streaming games, and The Verge previously reported that the company is hiring for a number of roles to build out its cloud gaming infrastructure. Cloud gaming has been at the center of the regulatory fight over Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, and it seems like whatever the outcome of that proposed merger, Sony wants to take back some of the video game streaming market share it previously ceded to Game Pass and xCloud.
Most video game studios, or at least the bigger ones, will have experience with Foley, a long-standing craft that revolves around creating cinematic sound effects using everyday objects.
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It’s nothing new. Many of Star Wars’ most iconic sounds were made using stuff like TV tubes and vacuum cleaners, and there are loads of excellent features on the internet showing how everyone from Bungie to Naughty Dog have used Foley to bring their own games to life. Even Unpacking, a cute little pixel game about putting things on shelves, featured over 14,000 different sound effects.
Today it’s God of War Ragnarok’s turn, in this excellent video put together by Wired, and this is already one of my all-time favourites, mostly because of the sheer volume of effects it shows.
Meeting PlayStation Studios’ Joanna Fang, we get to see how loads of the game’s crunchiest, squelchiest sound effects were made. A galloping horse’s hooves are actually just a pair of toilet plungers. Kratos smashing an enemy’s skull in is actually Fang crushing a melon with a crowbar. One of the most interesting is that you can get a perfect replica of snow crunching underfoot by…walking on coal instead.
How This Woman Creates God of War’s Sound Effects | Obsessed | WIRED
I love that the sound of floorboards is made by just slapping a shipping pallet. That twisting some leather sounds like someone being strangled. And that to get the sound of someone punching a dude wearing armour they…OK, used a boxing glove to punch some armour.
Like I’ve said, there’s nothing particularly new or relevatory here, Foley is a relatively ancient craft in modern show business, but this video is a fantastic example of showing the depth and variety of sounds that can be produced in a single room, and how a Foley artist’s passion for the job can be one of the most important—if also unsung—parts of our experience with a game.
The Last Of Us—a zombie apocalypse game, you might have heard of it—was finally released on PC this week. That’s good news for anyone who hasn’t managed to play it over its past three releases on various PlayStation consoles, but the bad news is that, at launch at least, the game isn’t at its best.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
At time of posting the game only has a 33% positive rating on Steam, a figure and timeframe that has little to do with the quality of the game itself, and everything to do with the condition it has released in. Player’s complaints are many, but they boil down to a few widespread issues like:
Freezes: The game is locking up at all kinds of random places, sometimes on its own, sometimes taking Steam (or the whole PC) with it.
CTD: The game is constantly crashing to the desktop for many users.
Performance: Players are complaining that the game places far too much strain on the CPU rather than the GPU, and that as a result performance is nowhere near as smooth as it should be relative to their systems.
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Mouse stutter: Now this one is funny. Apparently using the keyboard + mouse results in stutters. Using a gamepad removes this. So there’s a control-based performance hit? Wild (this was also reportedly an issue with the Uncharted ports as well).
Some of my favourite Steam reviews include:
Wow this runs like crap
The single worst PC port I have ever seen. Waited 10 years for the game, avoiding any and all walkthrough videos, reviews, spoilers and etc. and this disgusting excuse of a port ruined every single ounce of excitement I had for the game. Building shaders for almost 2 hours now, crashes in main menu while building shaders every 5 or so minutes.
Terrible optimization. Game takes more than 8 gigs of VRAM on medium settings, 100% CPU utilization in menu. And the temps are really high too. Probably going to refund soon.
Pre-purchased & pre-loaded. Launched it as soon as it was ready. Went to the setings. Turns out this game is eating up nearly 10GB of VRAM at 1440p max settings (game defaulted the settings to maximum). I’m running a RTX 3080 Ti with 12GB VRAM, mind you. Never could get past the menu screen which always crashes when the game displays a notification at the bottom right corner that reads ‘BUILDING SHADERS’.
While you’d expect this stuff will be fixed (or at least improved) in the months to come, it’s starting to become a disappointing pattern that many of Sony’s big PlayStation ports are hitting with performance problems on PC. Horizon was a mess, Uncharted suffered from many of these same problems and now this. Sure, there’s encouragement to be found there too—Horizon overcame its early struggles to be a damn fine experience on the PC—but these bad first impressions aren’t helping anyone.
For what it’s worth, Naughty Dog has responded to the issues, saying:
The Last of Us Part I PC players: we’ve heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you’ve reported. We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches.
Let’s all get on the same page before going any further: this is not canon. This is not hidden lore, endorsed by Nintendo, that you should arm yourself with and take with you on an official basis every time you play a Mario game from now on. OK?
OK good. So, here’s a panel from a 1996 manga (Super Mario 64 4Koma Gag Battle), which is suggesting that maybe 1-UP mushrooms grow out of the bodies of the Marios who have died before you.
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Fuck.
As the ever-wonderful Supper Mario Broth point out, this is from a manga that is “filled with jokes and eccentric theories”, and that it “should be taken more as an interesting thought experiment than anything that would actually be endorsed by Nintendo!”
Let’s do that, then. Let’s take this as a thought experiment. Imagine this is really how this all works. What it’s suggesting for the way the Mushroom Kingdom operates, and Mario’s relation to it, is fascinating. It’s some Returnal, Groundhog Day type shit. Mario isn’t just here to save the Princess. He’s trapped here, in a place outside of not just Brooklyn, but space and time.
Every 1-UP mushroom you see is a former, failed attempt, where a Mario—you, just like you, but also not you—has died, his heroic spirit extracted and preserved for the next Mario. Who is also you, until his demise, when the mushroom will be collected by…you.
I love the idea that in 2023 a lot of people’s first thoughts—mine included—weren’t about the timeline stuff but drawing fungus analogies with The Last Of Us. And that this would be such a Nintendo take on it. In Naughty Dog’s universe, the mushrooms growing out of dead people are a threat to all of humanity, and create ravenous zombies. In Nintendo’s, they’re just a cute little thing that helps the player by giving them special powers. Well, “cute” provided you don’t think about where they came from…
The first season of The Last of Us, the undeniable smash-hit HBO series based on the video game of the same name, has ended. And though the discourse about the controversial ending rages on, people are already looking ahead to season two, which will introduce one of the most infamous characters in the series: Abby Anderson and her incredibly toned arms.
I’d like a little more She-Bulk in my She-Hulk, please.Image: Marvel / Disney
But it’s not just the game industry, as proven time and time again by the dearth of women superheroes built like Victoria’s Secret models. Does Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman look like she can do anything other than strut and make mealy-mouthed comments on the Israeli-Palestine conflict? Is Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow capable of pulling off gymnastic stunts when she’s wearing a SKIMS waist trainer under a leather catsuit?
In an Entertainment Weekly interview, She-Hulk executive producer Kat Coiro responded to rumors that “Marvel requested She-Hulk’s muscles be made smaller,” saying that She-Hulk didn’t need to be all that big, actually.
We honestly talked about strength more than aesthetics. We studied musculature and we studied women athletes who were incredibly strong. We really leaned towards Olympians rather than bodybuilders. That’s where a lot of our body references came from, very strong Olympic athletes. So she doesn’t have a bodybuilder’s physique, but she absolutely has a very strong physique that can justify the actions that she does in the show. I think people expected a bodybuilder and for her to have these big, massive muscles but she looks more like Olympians.
Unfortunately, until recently, one of the few examples of a muscular woman in modern media was MMA-fighter-turned-actor Gina Carano as Cara Dune on The Mandalorian. Her arms were absolutely gigantic, exploding out from her chest armor with purpose. She dwarfed every other person sharing a scene with her. Sadly, Carano came out as a transphobe and a covid pandemic anti-masker, so she got the boot, and I worried I’d never see someone built like her on TV or in movies again.
Mandalorian muscle mommies
This is the way: Cast more muscular femmes in TV shows and movies.Image: Katy O’Brian on Instagram / Kotaku
Thankfully, Katy O’Brian came to the rescue. Though she’s only briefly in The Mandalorian season 2, she returns as a major character in the third season, and yes, we do get to see her arms. In fact, her muscles are so prominent that fans of the series already made an apt comparison, tweeting that O’Brian, an actor and martial artist, should play Abby in The Last of Us season 2.
It’s certainly not a far stretch. Though Abby is voiced by Laura Bailey and has the face of former Naughty Dog dev Jocelyn Mettler, her body double is CrossFit athlete and former collegiate swimmer Colleen Fotsch, who looks like she could pick me (a pretty muscular woman) up with one arm and wield me like a baseball bat. Fotsch, who did not respond to Kotaku’s request for comment, has a litany of YouTube videos showing off workout routines—and considering she’s currently a data analyst by trade, she’s proof that women can be muscle mommies while also living fulfilled NARP (non-athletic regular people) lives.
Casting an actor who is athletically inclined and already ripped up like a bad report card as Abby in The Last of Us season two makes a ton of sense—though I find myself longing to see a wild bulk-up of an actor not already built like a brick shithouse. But also, I just want to see more muscular women in movies and television, guys. I don’t really care how they get there, I just want them there, muscles rippling like coiled snakes under their skin.
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.
Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.
To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.
The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show
Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.
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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.
The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.
What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?
Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.
Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.
The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.
After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.
What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?
Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.
HBO Max
Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.
Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.
For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.
Image: Naughty Dog
The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part IIfocuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.
In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.
Well, friends. We’ve come to the end of the road, at least for now. Episode nine of HBO’s The Last of Us is the season finale, bringing us to the end of the story told in the first game. Even the episode’s title, “Look for the Light,” neatly closes the loop opened by that of the first episode, “When You’re Lost In the Darkness.” Deeply faithful to the game’s provocative, morally ambiguous ending and other famous story beats in its final chapter, the episode nonetheless departs from the source material in a few key ways, starting with its opening. Let’s start with the beginning of the end.
Ashley Johnson as Ellie’s mother Anna
Notably, this is the first entry since episode two that begins with a cold-open prologue rather than the title sequence. After the first two episodes, I actually thought this was something the show might be committed to in the long term, with each episode kicking off with a different, relevant glimpse of life before the pandemic or some other thread that could inform our understanding of what was to come. But no, the device fell away early on, only to make one last return for the season finale, with a flashback that doesn’t exist in the game and that gives us a new perspective on two key characters: Marlene, and Anna, Ellie’s mother.
A few days ago, Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the game The Last of Us and one of the showrunners of HBO’s prediction, tweeted this:
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The image here is not a reference to a real thing that exists in our world. Rather, it’s a fictional comic book referenced in Uncharted 4, the final game in Naughty Dog’s other big franchise of the past 15+ years. But it speaks to the idea that Anna, Ellie’s mother, is a character who the writers of the game (and now the show) have thought a lot about, even if, until now, she’s never actually been seen. Players of the game will know that she and Marlene were friends, that Marlene promised Anna she’d look after Ellie, and that Anna was alongside Marlene in the fight for a better world, but this is her first actual appearance in official The Last of Us media, and the actor playing her is none other than Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie in the games.
We see Anna running through a forest, pursued by shrieking infected. As if that weren’t tough enough, she’s pregnant and going into labor. She emerges into a vast clearing dominated by a farmhouse, the Firefly insignia emblazoned on the nearby grain silo.
Racing to the top of the house, Anna barricades the door with a chair and draws a familiar-looking switchblade. Tragically, the determined infected busts through, and though Anna plunges the switchblade into its neck, it’s not before she’s bitten, sealing her fate. Ellie is born, and Anna cuts the umbilical cord. It must be something about the timing of all this that resulted in Ellie’s immunity.
Anna takes a moment to bond with her daughter, as we watch, knowing she has a few hours at best to spend with the child. And the credits roll.
One lie comes before another
Night falls, and three lights cut through the darkness, a possible visual nod to the Firefly slogan. Marlene and two men find Anna still in that room, quietly singing to baby Ellie. The song she’s singing is “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” by A-ha. It’s a song we know Ellie hears later in life, as she has a cassette tape of A-ha’s greatest hits in episode seven, which makes use of the band’s “Take On Me” at one point. (Interestingly, though “Take On Me” was a bigger hit in the U.S., “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” outperformed it in the UK.)
Screenshot: HBO
Marlene immediately sees the bite on Anna’s leg, and here’s where something extraordinary happens: Anna says she cut Ellie’s umbilical cord before she was bitten. Of course it’s perfectly understandable. She did cut it only moments after, and whatever survival instinct she may have once had for herself has likely now transferred onto her daughter. She wants to give her daughter a chance. But as a thematic device, it’s significant because it bookends this final episode with lies. Ellie’s life begins with a lie, and later, it’s changed by one, both from people who, in their own ways and for their own reasons, are very invested in keeping her alive.
Anna, reminding Marlene that they’ve been friends for their whole lives, tells Marlene to kill her and to take care of Ellie, and to give her the switchblade. Marlene protests that she can’t, she can’t do any of those things, she especially can’t kill her friend, but then she musters the strength to do so. She is no stranger to gritting her teeth and doing what must be done in the struggle for a better world. You can tell it eats her up inside, but the world of The Last of Us offers little alternative for one who is truly, deeply committed to making a difference.
Outside Salt Lake City
Now the show leaps into its approximation of the game’s final chapter. In both, Joel is uncharacteristically chatty, his bond with Ellie no longer in doubt after all they’ve been through together and especially after the harrowing events of episode eight. Ellie, by contrast, is preoccupied, remote, distracted perhaps by the magnitude of what their arrival in Salt Lake City could mean. While the Joel of the game talks about what a beautiful day it is, TV Joel excitedly shows Ellie that he found a can of Chef Boyardee, calling back to their campfire meal in episode four when the good chef’s awesomeness was one of the few things they could agree on. Both Joels talk about one day teaching Ellie guitar, and though she says she’d like that, it’s clear that right now, she has other things on her mind.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
One interesting detail from the game that’s omitted from the show is a dream that Ellie tells Joel about, in which she’s on a plane and it’s going down, so she busts into the cabin only to find that there’s no captain. So she takes the controls but she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and just as the plane is about to crash, she wakes up. It’s a pretty typical anxiety dream—I actually have nightmares about plane crashes from time to time myself—and it makes sense that Ellie would feel that her life is out of control, but she remarks on the strangeness of having a dream set on a flying plane when she’s never flown on a plane in real life. She never got to experience the pre-cordyceps world, and yet the ghost of it is everywhere around her.
The famous giraffe scene
Joel and Ellie cut through a building on their way to the hospital, and in the show, for what I’m pretty sure is the first and only time, Joel does something he does repeatedly in the game: he boosts Ellie up, here so she can lower a ladder for him. However, the usually attentive Ellie is caught off guard by something and instead ends up just dropping the ladder and running off to look at something. Joel pursues her, perhaps worried at first that she’s in danger, and what follows is one of the game’s most famous moments, faithfully recreated in the show.
Screenshot: HBO
What he finds is Ellie, standing awestruck by the sight of a giraffe, peacefully munching on some leaves growing on the building. In the game, Joel encourages Ellie to pet the giraffe. In the show, he encourages her to grab some leaves and feed it a little bit, and the sight of its long tongue reaching out for that green goodness is pretty great. For Joel, though, the best sight here is the sight of Ellie enjoying this moment. You can tell, particularly in the show thanks to Pedro Pascal’s acting, that Joel is happy to be alive to witness and share in this moment with her. So often, it’s not the thing itself that matters, so much as it is the sharing of it with someone.
Perhaps part of why we’re drawn to apocalypse stories is the way they can help us focus on what really matters. There’s a line in last year’s HBO post-apocalypse prestige drama Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. Mandel) from central character Jeevan who says, “Having just one person, it’s a big deal. Just one other person.” I’m reminded of that in this scene. Like Station Eleven, The Last of Us is deeply concerned with what makes our lives mean something, and in my experience, that’s always tied up in connection with others, in one way or another.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Screenshot: HBO
Moving to another spot which lets them watch the whole giraffe family walk off into the distance, Joel asks Ellie a question he asked her much earlier in the game, or, in the case of the show, way back in episode two, as they stood looking toward the capitol building in Boston. “So, is it everything you hoped for?” Ellie recalls that moment too and says it’s had its ups and downs before repeating something she said back then as well: “You can’t deny that view.” It’s a moment that makes us feel the journey they’ve been on, all the ground they’ve covered, the time that’s passed, and all the ways in which things between them have changed from that moment so much earlier, when all Ellie was to Joel was some human cargo he resented having to deal with. Coming to this moment in the game again as I replayed it for this recap, knowing what was coming, I almost wanted to linger there forever, to let them linger there forever, and spare us all the pain ahead.
Now, he doesn’t want to imagine his life without her again, and so he tells her that she doesn’t have to go through with this. In both the game and the show, her response is the same: “After all we’ve been through, everything that I’ve done, it can’t be for nothing.” She tells him that once this is done, they can go wherever he wants, but “there’s no halfway with this.” In the game, Joel looks up just in time to see the last giraffe disappear into the distance. The moment has passed. Their choice is made.
Joel confronts the past
Next, their journey to the hospital takes them through a triage camp the army set up in the days immediately following the outbreak. In both the game and the show, this is the site for a confrontation of sorts with Joel’s past, though that takes very different forms in each version.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, Joel mentions having been in a similar camp after the outbreak. When Ellie asks if it was after he lost Sarah, he says yes, and she tells him how sorry she is for his loss. Previously, Joel’s forbidden Ellie from mentioning any of his losses, from talking about Tess or his daughter, but this time, he says “That’s okay, Ellie.” A short time later, Ellie gives Joel the same photograph of himself with Sarah that he refused earlier when Tommy offered it to him. Ellie says Maria showed it to her back at the dam and she stole it. Joel, obviously moved, says, “Well, no matter how hard you try, I guess you can’t escape your past. Thank you.”
In the show, however, we return to something first teased back in episode three. At the time, Joel said that the scar on his forehead was from someone shooting at him and missing. Now, he tells Ellie that the wound is what landed him in triage, and also that “I was the guy that shot and missed.” After Sarah’s death, he “couldn’t see the point anymore,” he says, but he flinched when he pulled the trigger. “So time heals all wounds, I guess?” Ellie asks. Joel says “It wasn’t time that did it” and gives her a meaningful look.
Screenshot: HBO
After this emotionally heavy moment, Joel seeks to lighten things up by actually requesting some shitty puns. It’s a great little exchange, with Joel and Ellie disagreeing on the quality of some of the jokes—one she declares “actually good” and he calls “a zero out of ten”—but my favorite bit is when Ellie says “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” Joel at first looks scandalized but when Ellie asks, “Too soon?” Joel says, “No, it’s topical.” Joke time is soon interrupted, though, when some kind of gas grenade gets tossed their way, Ellie is dragged off, and Joel is conked on the head with a rifle.
One last dance with infected before all is said and done
This episode and its differences from the game’s corresponding sequence reveal some interesting differences in how the game and the show approach pacing and combat. In the show, episode eight was the final crucible, the peril and terror of that situation solidifying Joel and Ellie’s bond, and it likely would have been anticlimactic for the two to have another encounter with infected at this point. The dramatic purpose of such encounters has already been fulfilled. There’s really nowhere else for them to go. In the game, however, as a mainstream commercial product released in 2013, it would have been strange for there not to be one final encounter with infected. For many players, such combat is first and foremost what they come to a game like this for. So you do have one final encounter with a whole mess of infected (including multiple bloaters) in the partially flooded tunnels near the hospital. Once they’re all finished off, Joel utters Ellie’s favorite catchphrase, “Endure and survive.”
Look for the light.Screenshot: Naughty Dog
They’re not out of the woods yet, though. A bit later, Joel gets stuck in a bus that’s rapidly filling with water. Ellie (who can’t swim) attempts to rescue him, but is herself swept away. The current carries Joel toward her and he sees her, framed by light, before pulling her up out of the water and attempting to resuscitate her. This is where the Fireflies find them, and knock Joel unconscious.
Marlene and morality
Joel wakes up in a room with Marlene (Merle Dandridge in both the game and the show), who marvels at the fact that the two of them came all this way and survived, that Joel actually managed to deliver Ellie there, when the same journey cost the lives of so many of her people. “It was (all) her,” Joel says. “She fought like hell to get here.”
Screenshot: HBO
When Joel insists on seeing Ellie, Marlene tells him he can’t. “She’s being prepped for surgery.” When Joel realizes that cordyceps grows in the brain and that the surgery Marlene is describing means Ellie’s death, well, he knows what he has to do.
Notably, in the show, Marlene offers a more detailed explanation of Ellie’s immunity, and how the doctor intends to use that to create a cure. I suspect that this, along with Joel’s line back in episode six suggesting that if Marlene says they can make a cure, they can do it, are meant to deflect the fairly common response to the show’s central moral dilemma, a response I saw as recently as this past weekend on Twitter, that says “They probably wouldn’t have been able to make a cure anyway.”
My issue with this response is that I view it as a reluctance or refusal to engage with The Last of Us on its own terms. I think it’s a copout, a way to more easily justify what Joel does by saying “the stakes weren’t that big anyway” by disregarding the internal logic of the work itself. Sure, if you view The Last of Us in “realistic” terms, you can say that the odds of a vaccine being made weren’t great, but that’s not the moral dilemma we’re being asked to engage with here. The game and the show both work to establish this as a situation in which a vaccine is clearly possible.
The game does this in part through an audio diary you can find in the hospital in which the lead surgeon rattles off a bunch of whatever the medical equivalent of technobabble is, terms and phrases that are meant to sound legitimate within the fiction of the game and establish that the surgeon knows what he’s talking about. He then says, “We’re about to hit a milestone in human history equal to…the discovery of penicillin. After years of wandering in circles, we’re about to come home…All our sacrifices, and the hundreds of men and women who’ve bled for this cause, or worse, will not be in vain.” We are meant to view what Joel does as in opposition to that, as overriding all of that. That’s not to say that we can’t still conclude that Joel is right to do what he does. But we should at least consider it within the moral calculus that the game and the show actually establish.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Ten years ago, I felt that so many players’ reaction to the game’s climax was not just one of agreeing with Joel but one of cheering “Fuck yeah!” while he did what he does, of reveling in his undoing of everything the Fireflies have done, in his murder of Marlene, and I wonder if some of that isn’t just because it’s very easy to feel fully aligned with someone when you’ve spent so long walking in their shoes. But I can imagine a game focused on Marlene, one that follows her for years and years, from establishing the Fireflies, working with and then tragically losing Ellie’s mother Anna, watching over Ellie from afar while trying to undermine FEDRA and seeking a cure or some way to unfuck the world, all the while seeing her fellow passionate believers fight and die alongside her, and then coming to the heartbreaking moment where her own best friend’s daughter is the world’s last best hope. I wonder if, given the chance to experience Marlene’s struggle that way, to see things from her perspective, some people who see the ending of The Last of Us in very simple terms might find their view of it complicated.
And this was Anna’s fight as well. You can find an audio log that’s effectively Marlene speaking to Anna, to the memory of her friend, and in it she says “Here’s a chance to save us…all of us. This is what we were after…what you were after.” I don’t think any of this is at all easy for Marlene. I think she’s just learned by now how to do even the things she finds very, very hard, if she believes it supports the greater good.
None of this is simple. I’m conflicted about it myself, and I do sometimes put one life ahead of many. (It’s just a game, of course, but you’d better believe that at the end of Life Is Strange, I made the choice to save the one person I felt close to and cared about deeply over a town full of others.) And I have no problem with Joel doing what he does. As I’ve said before, I want art and media that depicts human beings doing questionable or complicated or awful things sometimes. I just want people to actually engage with that complexity, rather than acting as if feeling at all conflicted about how all this plays out is silly and that Joel does the only reasonable thing he could have done.
Saving Ellie, dooming the world
Marlene, sensing that Joel is gonna be a problem, tries to have him escorted out of the building. However, he kills his escort, and fights his way through the hospital to save Ellie. In the game, I find this sequence quite challenging. The hospital provides your Firefly enemies with so many opportunities to flank you. The Joel in the TV show seems to have it considerably easier. (And in case anyone is wondering, yes, in the game you do get a new weapon, the assault rifle, here, just like Joel does in the show.) In any case, he kills a whole mess of dudes on his way to Ellie.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Arriving in the operating room, Joel orders the doctor to unhook her. He grabs a scalpel and stands in Joel’s way. Joel kills him, too. Yes, the doctor was about to take her life. By doing this, though, Joel has taken the life of someone who was deeply loved by somebody else. And how many of the people he killed on his way up here will also leave a void in the lives of people after today? God, what a moral mess.
Joel has one last encounter before he makes his escape, this time with Marlene. In both the show and the game, Marlene asks Joel to consider what Ellie herself would want. The look that plays across his face in both cases shows that he knows what he’s doing isn’t what she’d want.
After years and years of working tirelessly for a shot like this at a better world, after sacrificing so much, Marlene, too, is killed. “You’d just come after her,” Joel says, before pulling the trigger.
Joel’s lie near Jackson
Ellie wakes up in the back of a car, still in her hospital gown. Joel’s driving them to Jackson, and when she asks him what happened, he feeds her a lie about there being dozens of people who share her immunity, and the doctors not being able to make any use of it all, to the point that “they’ve stopped looking for a cure.” Ellie is obviously crushed.
Significantly, in the game’s short final sequence, you play as Ellie as she and Joel walk the last bit of distance toward Jackson. Joel, ready for his life with Ellie to begin in earnest, starts talking about how much he thinks Sarah would have liked him. Ellie is, of course, preoccupied, and eventually she stops Joel, and starts talking about how she lost Riley.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The point of the story, I think, is that Ellie felt left behind (sorry) by Riley’s death, that she would have rather died if it could have meant a cure than being alive, and that she suspects Joel made a choice of his own accord to save her rather than let that happen. Joel, perhaps sensing where this is going, tries to offer some of his old-fashioned wisdom about how it can be tough to come to grips with surviving but you keep finding things to live for. But she demands a straight answer, asking him to swear that everything he said about the Fireflies is true. “I swear,” he says.
Screenshot: HBO
There’s a long pause. Is she doubting him? Deciding whether she can trust him? Debating telling him that he’s full of shit? Where would any of that leave her now, in this world where everything she thought she was living and fighting for has now evaporated into nothing?
“Okay,” she says.
Final thoughts
Playing through the game again alongside watching the series gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps most of all, I thought about how, just by virtue of being an interactive experience that’s set in perhaps the most lovingly rendered vision of the post-apocalypse ever created, the game The Last of Us is much more about the haunted world than the show is. Naughty Dog clearly approached designing the locations you pass through very thoughtfully. They didn’t just design some assets and then toss them together. Quite the opposite. For every house or apartment you enter, you can tell that Naughty Dog asked themselves questions like: Who lived here? What was their cultural background? What did they do for a living? Did they have any pets? Most of us probably know the sense of emptiness a person can leave behind when they die. Closets filled with clothes they’ll never wear again. A toothbrush in the bathroom. This is a world filled with that emptiness.
On the other hand, I appreciate that the television show found a few opportunities, here and there, to remind us that even in its world, love is possible, and by extension, lives of meaning are possible. The game, with its framing of Bill and Frank’s relationship, with the tragedy of Henry and Sam, leans so relentlessly into loss and tragedy, with little dramatic counterpoint to remind us what love in this world—any kind of love, the love between a man and his adopted daughter, for instance—can even look like. Of course episode three—the Bill and Frank episode—was the most radical instance of the show departing from the game to offer an image of love, but it wasn’t the only one. Marlon and Florence in episode six got so little screen time, but there, too, thanks to the two wonderful actors cast in those roles, we got a sense of a real, lived-in relationship, people being there for each other across decades.
All of this is to say that I appreciate that the creative team behind the HBO show approached this undertaking as an adaptation, not merely a retelling or recreation. Now the wait begins for the show’s next season, when I look forward to finding out how they continue to not just re-tell the exact same story we’ve already experienced, but adapt it for a new medium.
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