“We wanted to do the opposite of Resident Evil - which I love, but it’s so over-the-top and you’re fighting giant spiders and it’s all about enemy variety,” Druckmann says. Druckmann’s influences are relationship stories set against apocalyptic backgrounds, such as the film Children of Men and the novel City of Thieves by David Benioff (of Game of Thrones fame). “Zombie survival horror” is an easy way to categorize The Last of Us (and there are indeed terrifying ex-human “clickers” controlled by a parasitic fungus that was mutated by global warming roaming about). He returned to his zombie idea, which he had fleshed out into a graphic novel. The result, 2009’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, was a massive hit, and Druckmann found himself in the enviable position of being able to pick his next project.
He was hired by acclaimed gaming company Naughty Dog and worked his way up to land the plum gig of co-lead designer and co-writer on the first sequel to the Indiana Jones-like adventure game Uncharted. The idea languished Druckmann’s career didn’t. “And he didn’t like it,” recalls Druckmann, still looking amused and mildly surprised after all these years. Taking inspiration from a two-character PlayStation 2 game called Ico and the character John Hartigan (Frank Miller’s tough protagonist from Sin City), Druckmann sketched a story of a man who lost his daughter and a girl who lost her father, who team up.ĭruckmann’s professor pitched the idea to Romero. But it was a minor miracle the game was made in the first place, and now it’s become a show that somehow must get everything right - or risk becoming the gaming industry’s biggest Hollywood disappointment yet.
Zombie highway 2 characters series#
The series, co-produced by Sony and premiering Jan. 15, is toplined by two Game of Thrones veterans - Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey - and could very well become HBO’s Next Big Thing at a time when competition for the prestige TV streaming crown is fiercer than ever and belt-tightening cuts have made every major series launch really count.
The Last of Us’ complex, emotionally wrenching storyline seems ideal for a debut season of television. “The way to break the video game curse is to adapt the best video game story ever - not by a little, but by a lot,” Mazin says. In this case, however, the answer to the question Mazin kept being asked should be clear to anybody who played 2013’s cinematic The Last of Us, which follows a hard-case survivor named Joel tasked with smuggling special “cargo” - a teenage girl named Ellie - across a postapocalyptic, zombie-filled former United States. Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal PHOTOGRAPHED BY RYAN PFLUGER
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