The Final of Us launched in 2013 on PS3 as a status narrative expertise. The sport was developed by Naughty Canine, a studio that had been essential in setting the usual for story-centric video games that emulated a conventional Hollywood format. Its Uncharted video games mimicked the spectacle of journey movies by means of Nathan Drake, an Indiana Jones kind with the luck of John McClane. However The Final of Us noticed the studio pivot from blockbuster motion right into a style that dominated the early 2000s — the dystopia — and within the course of introduced the standard of status TV drama to video video games. The sport was so completely timed to the second, its attain has turn out to be inescapable ever since.
The Final of Us and its numerous iterations have held dominance over the sport trade for almost a decade, and now it’s poised to do the identical on the planet that impressed it. The discharge of HBO’s The Final of Us sequence is imminent, and early critiques are making claims to it being probably the greatest online game variations up to now. Craig Mazin, one of many key creatives on the undertaking, said not too long ago to Empire in no unsure phrases that The Final of Us is “the best story that has ever been advised in video video games.” Broadly, his opinion echoes most of the main critiques through the recreation’s 2013 launch: IGN gave it an ideal 10 and labeled it a masterpiece; GameSpot referred to as it a “singular journey”; and Recreation Informer ended its evaluate with a staccato “you gained’t overlook it.”
For Mazin, that opinion appears to be primarily based in a sure relationship to characters and their existence in a zombie-infested wasteland. He calls the sport’s story “grounded” and famous that “it actually made you’re feeling” earlier than stating that he’s performed video games since 1977 and by no means skilled something prefer it. This can be a acquainted form of argument for these of us who’ve tracked the connection between conventional movie tradition and recreation tradition through the years. In 2004, Steven Spielberg claimed {that a} signal of video games’ medium maturity can be “when somebody confesses that they cried at Stage 17.” Controversially, and to the ire of many recreation gamers, Roger Ebert doubled down many instances in regards to the relationship of video games to true emotional expertise, writing in 2010 that “no video gamer now dwelling will survive lengthy sufficient to expertise the medium as an artwork kind.”
It’s clear that we’ve lived lengthy sufficient to cry at Stage 17 and many individuals, together with somebody with a considerable growth take care of a serious community, have determined that the best online game story ever advised may make an awesome tv present.
However what, precisely, makes The Final of Us stand out for therefore many, together with Mazin?
![Joel leans over in a still from The Last of Us Part 1, captured on PS5](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GCgUaOmGqylpbDAq7LPXulL689U=/0x0:3840x2160/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3840x2160):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23892706/d20220516_TLOUX_Annouce_Stills_3_WM.jpg)
The Final of Us, the sport, introduces gamers to Joel, the survivor of a fungal plague that has decimated the world and created skinny enclaves of humanity that attempt to defend themselves in opposition to the zombified useless who’re contaminated, and reanimated, by a Cordyceps pressure that turns them into attack-ready monsters. The sport opens with the loss of life of Joel’s daughter, then depicts him a few years later as he’s unwillingly tasked with caring for Ellie, a younger woman who’s proof against an infection. They journey throughout the US collectively searching for the Fireflies, a corporation that claims to be engaged on a remedy for the plague. Alongside the way in which, they encounter different survivors, murderers, and an enormous variety of contaminated that they need to stealth, chop, and shoot their means via. The arc of the sport brings Joel, who has made his means in life merely as a survivor, again to an emotionally full human, and units up Ellie to mature from a lady right into a younger grownup. Ultimately, they kind a father-daughter relationship, which turns within the closing hours of the sport due to a strikingly ambivalent however endlessly debatable conclusion.
When The Final of Us initially launched in 2013, the connection between its story and the way its emotional arc was communicated via gameplay was a big aspect in lots of main critiques. Polygon’s personal evaluate factors out that the sport’s stealth sections and wobbly gunplay generate a rigidity that units itself other than different third-person motion video games, noting that the rhythm of avoiding enemies or clumsily preventing them lent a context to the connection between protagonists Joel and Ellie. Recreation Informer made comparable claims, extending it to shortage of assets on the planet, asking gamers to scrounge for the provides to make important gameplay objects that might permit them to face the challenges that, as soon as overcome, delivered the following main story beat. As recreation co-director and present co-creator Neil Druckmann as soon as stated himself, “numerous the storytelling occurs on the joystick.”
Whereas motion video games with heavy story components have tended to comply with the gameplay-to-story-segment-to-gameplay rhythm for the reason that Nineties, with franchises like Name of Obligation or Grand Theft Auto producing discourse round whether or not or not you skip the cutscenes, the blockbuster video games of the early 2000s that got here earlier than The Final of Us laid monitor that Naughty Canine may comply with to find out greatest and worst practices. The Halo, Gears of Warfare, Grand Theft Auto, Name of Obligation, and Murderer’s Creed franchises had all largely made their names with revolutionary gameplay and immediately delivered, simply segmented storytelling. Together with Naughty Canine’s personal Uncharted video games, a complete media trade was condensing round spectacular, costly, closely promoted motion video games that claimed to ship each severe, mature tales and compelling gameplay.
However there are various elements as to why The Final of Us ascended to stage of masterpiece for therefore many. One is Naughty Canine’s willingness to lean into cinematic language. Every narrative piece in The Final of Us leveraged the {hardware} of the PS3 to render strongly animated human beings having sensible reactions to the world round them. The sweeping cameras or the evocative cuts to components on the planet that pepper most different blockbuster video games had been deserted for small areas and close-ups. In narrative concept, we name this focalization, a flowery phrase for sticking near the ideas and emotions of the characters we’re seeing the world via and with. The Final of Us is an intensely focalized recreation. The narrative strategies centered on this too, delivering purposefully sophisticated characters whose actions had been angled not solely on the challenges in entrance of them however a broader set of emotional considerations. That is perhaps not shocking, on condition that The Final of Us’ builders credit score fiction guru Robert McKee’s extremely programmatic textbook Story with a number of the primary structural assumptions made about participant funding in story and motion.
![Troy Baker in a motion capture suit performing an emotional scene as Joel in Last of Us Part 1](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vn8fk2l9aQeUUEm23dR-gYV5BCk=/0x0:1421x795/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1421x795):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24355226/troy_baker_joel_motion_capture_last_of_us.jpg)
The sport’s drama additionally advantages from performances centered in tightly directed motion-capture sequences. Watching a number of the extra poignant scenes with the graphics stripped away, as seen within the official Final of Us making-of documentary Grounded, demonstrates how a lot the bodily and voice performing performances of the actors drive the feelings which can be depicted within the recreation. It’s clear that Naughty Canine knew what they’d, on condition that one of many earliest promotional items for the sport was an evocative vocal efficiency from Troy Baker, the online game actor who performs Joel, speaking wistfully in regards to the world gone away. It pulls an individual in purely on efficiency in a gesture that’s extra acquainted to theatrical trailers. In video video games, a promotional web site, then and now, is extra more likely to have a bizarre 3D render of a gun than a gestural voice-over. In 2013, these had been notable, and caught out in opposition to different narrative-centric video games that remained extra historically science fiction, like Gears of Warfare, or extra tied to the tactical-badass style, like Name of Obligation.
These tones didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Very similar to the journey movies appropriated for the Uncharted franchise, The Final of Us intensified, and extra deeply mined, a sequence of massively standard inventive references from different media. The video of Baker talking over inventory footage was not the one factor posted on the early official web site for the sport — there was additionally a 14-second clip lifted from a bit of BBC’s massively standard Planet Earth nature documentary that demonstrated the consequences of the Cordyceps fungus on ants, an concept that offered the baseline idea for The Final of Us’ contaminated enemies. In that means, the core idea of the sport was ripped from the headlines in the way in which that science fiction texts have all the time executed, giving the sport’s ideas a way of familiarity for a lot of gamers and a believable explanatory idea.
The opposite references are perhaps extra apparent, even when they’re barely extra broad. Zombie media had built-in recognition throughout the early 2000s, with early standouts in movie being 2002’s 28 Days Later and 2004’s Daybreak of the Lifeless remake. The favored 2003 ebook The Zombie Survival Information, written in a matter-of-fact tone in regards to the “actual” issues somebody ought to do about zombies ought to the issue come up, offered some conceptual spine for a disparate array of multimedia work. By 2010, a complete zombie phenomenon had slowly crept its means into American media tradition, even infecting genres far past its horror roots — simply take a look at the virality of Pleasure and Prejudice and Zombies and the Invoice Murray homicide simulator Zombieland. 2010’s The Strolling Lifeless present on AMC, which ran till 2022, took the zombie idea critically and heaped on a hefty serving to of melodrama. Leaning into a number of the elements that made Cormac McCarthy’s The Street a preferred, Oprah-approved bestseller half a decade earlier, The Strolling Lifeless outlined a template of charged violence, acceptable zombie gore, and parental relationships that continues to be deployed in a comparatively unaltered kind right now. These resonances are so strongly felt that Kirk Hamilton’s evaluate for Kotaku summarized these final two paragraphs succinctly by stating that The Final of Us is “constructed on the skeleton of so many post-apocalyptic tales earlier than it” and that it “embraces the tropes of zombie fiction” to the hilt.
![Joel aims his shotgun at a fungus zombie in The Last of Us Part 1 Remaster on PS4](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mNjCFXcImvhPcS7DfX7mxRBlF9Q=/0x0:1920x1080/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1920x1080):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24355229/joel_aims_at_bloater_1406594460.jpg)
A further context that needs to be famous right here is the notion of “status TV,” generally talked about because the golden age of TV, which typically simply means the elevated budgets and aspirations of tv through the early 2000s and carrying into right now. Exhibits like The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Males, and Breaking Unhealthy geared toward telling totally different sorts of tales than TV reveals had up to now, made attainable each by budgetary enlargement and the elevated enlargement of cable and how much language and violence was acceptable for TV. These reveals tended to concentrate on glowering males who waffled out and in of antihero standing, and who had been usually horrible to the individuals round them. They had been additionally filmed in kinds that had been underexplored on tv, changing into the mascots for “severe” TV work and customarily consuming the whole TV drama area, and so they usually deployed a form of stoic whiteness up in opposition to a broader, racialized public they had been in contest with (a thematic that The Final of Us additionally sadly inherited).
That is all to say: The Final of Us didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not some form of distinctive object that sprung absolutely shaped from the top of a staff of geniuses. As a substitute, it rode a wave of tradition and influences that allowed its improvements and key executions to be acquired and embraced by a broader tradition primed to take pleasure in its gameplay and to grasp its thematic strikes.
One other mind-set about that is via one other large narrative success in video games, which has had a considerable influence on the design of video games and their narratives for a full decade: 2012’s The Strolling Lifeless, developed by Telltale. Receiving a considerable variety of accolades, and a sturdy important and participant reception, it shares various themes about household and maturity with The Final of Us, and it asks comparable questions of the participant in regards to the moral use of violence and the way one may act on the finish of the world. Its resonance with the zombie style, whereas additionally pulling on the out-of-favor journey recreation style, meant that it had a story and mechanical novelty that drew many gamers in.
The Strolling Lifeless was a important recreation in a broader wave of what was termed the “dadification” of video games. This transfer, which has seen some late entries like 2022’s God of Warfare Ragnarök, put dads and their relationships to youngsters on the middle of recreation narratives. Much less a coherent style than a thematic motion in video games developed and launched within the 2010s, dadification stays a shorthand for paternal emotions being the driving motivator of characters who we are supposed to establish with, and that has maybe by no means been extra strongly dedicated to than in The Final of Us. The sport famously opens with the loss of life of Joel’s daughter, and the rest of the sport is in regards to the creating surrogate daughter relationship that he has together with his ward and cargo Ellie (a studying talked about usually by the builders themselves within the official The Final of Us podcast.) As recreation developer and critic Mattie Brice famous shortly after launch, this killing of Joel’s daughter within the prologue of the sport with the intention to clarify him as a personality operates as “a dad’s model of fridging a girlfriend in the beginning of a recreation,” referring to a standard narrative strategy of aligning us with males by harming the ladies of their lives.
A closing piece of the puzzle in explaining the phenomenon of The Final of Us, and its continued legacy as a considerable achievement in recreation narrative, has to do with cash made and spent. Naughty Canine is a subsidiary of Sony, and the video games that Naughty Canine makes are a part of a small core set of builders like Sony Santa Monica and Guerrilla Video games, who make merchandise that act as a form of front-of-house for demonstrating the intense chops of Sony as a curator of mature tales and status titles. The Final of Us is likely one of the keystone franchises that represents these inventive sensibilities of Sony. Solely two years later, then-president of Sony Shawn Layden was pitching the “energy of narrative” as a vital lens via which to see participant and viewers funding in online game merchandise.
Even after launch, The Final of Us by no means stopped commanding consideration due to the upkeep of the franchise by Sony and Naughty Canine. The unique recreation launched in the summertime of 2013, the quick (however important) DLC Left Behind adopted early in 2014, and later that very same 12 months The Final of Us Remastered appeared for PS4. Though it was six years till the official sequel was launched, the sport remained part of the PlayStation household and was constantly teased and promoted from 2016’s sequel tease onward. The remake of the unique recreation that launched final 12 months, adopted by the tv present this 12 months, reveals a considerable monetary and promotional push from the broader company equipment at the same time as damning studies of crunch tradition centered on the developer.
![A bloodied and tired Ellie looks off-camera in The Last of Us Part II](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8qMtPqpWXYKwCla20JFT_I3317M=/0x0:3840x2160/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3840x2160):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20071286/The_Last_of_Us__Part_II_20200629213022.jpg)
Whereas Sony and Naughty Canine have executed their half to maintain dialog about this sequence for the previous decade, a considerable a part of that upkeep has been executed by followers who’re fascinated with dialogue the concepts behind the sport. “How do you interpret the top of The Final of Us?” is a perennial matter for followers and recreation critics alike, and debating interpretations of the sport makes up a considerable quantity of the phrases written about it.
After the discharge of The Final of Us Half 2, the tenor of those conversations modified, particularly as followers turned extra invested within the growth of the sport within the wake of Bruce Straley, the co-director of The Final of Us, leaving Naughty Canine after the discharge of Uncharted 4. Followers started to overtly debate who on the inventive staff was most accountable for the event of The Final of Us’ closing path, creating elaborate explanations of how the therapy of co-director Neil Druckmann as an auteur did a disservice to the broader efforts of the staff. This was current in Naughty Canine’s official promotion as properly, on condition that Straley is first talked about within the official podcast 40 minutes into the primary episode as an apart to elucidate one thing a fight designer is discussing, and after Troy Baker calls Druckmann the best director he has ever labored with. Druckmann’s place because the face of the product created a state of affairs the place he was a direct goal of harassment for these with a political grievance in opposition to the undertaking, a state of affairs solely made extra sophisticated by the sequel’s structural borrowing from real-world geopolitics. The funding in Druckmann as the inventive pressure behind the undertaking, and his motion right into a key inventive for the tv present, means that these conversations will comply with the IP.
A cynical tackle The Final of Us’ sustained recognition over the previous 10 years, and its standing as an awesome recreation narrative, is that it hit the market with simply the suitable style tropes and the correct quantity of capital expenditure to hammer itself into the general public thoughts. That success was cannily adopted up on by an organization who may perceive the worth of a status IP with an auteur standing behind it, and the way we now have a really costly TV present that may push the IP even additional into public consciousness.
That’s a tough view, and I take a softer method: With The Final of Us, Naughty Canine approached status online game growth in a means the place the method of capturing performances, writing the plot beats and dialogue, and designing its world had been all subordinated below very conventional cinematic varieties. This determination made the sport stand out, and extra importantly, made it stand out legibly as a narrative of exhausting truths and tough roads. It’s no mistake that Craig Mazin, who (paired with John August on their Screenwriting 101 Scriptnotes podcast) is properly on his approach to having the wide-ranging status of a guru like Robert McKee, highlights The Final of Us as the best online game story. It’s packaged, visually and conceptually, within the televisual frameworks that he’s deeply conversant in and which he has his personal hand in selling as severe artistic endeavors.
The Final of Us porting from vital recreation to status TV drama is a maneuver that enables extra individuals to have interaction with, and perhaps hunt down, the unique recreation. On the identical time, it may be seen as a means of creating the IP past the bounds of console video games, particularly as cell video games proceed their world dominance of the video games trade and redefine the place of status narrative titles that you simply play on an enormous machine that sits close to a tv. Whereas The Final of Us was born as a digital recreation, it may have a extra expansive life, and afterlife, being the factor that it initially mimicked.