The Last of Us game concept

The concept for The Last of Us arose after watching BBC nature documentary Planet Earth, which showed the cordyceps fungus infected ants, resulting in taking over its brain and producing growths from its head; the idea that the fungus could infect humans became the initial idea for the game. Major artistic inspirations included the movies No Country for Old Men and The Road, comic The Walking Dead, historical novel City of Thieves, Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend and the films it inspired.

While the fungus epidemic is the main backdrop of the game, The Last of Us is not a “zombie game”, but “a love story about a father-daughter-like relationship”, influenced in part by the sequence between Nathan Drake and Tenzin, his Tibetan guide, in Uncharted 2. Joel is a survivor and anti-hero, and Ellie is a 14 year-old girl with no experience of the world pre-apocalypse. The composer for the game will be Gustavo Santaolalla. The team wanted to focus on emotion with the soundtrack rather than horror.

On release of the initial trailer for the game Dead Island, the team was concerned that the two games would be largely similar, both exploring the human or emotional side to an apocalyptic event. However, on release of the aforementioned game, the team realised that the gameplay did not match up to that showed by the trailer; by contrast, lead designer Neil Druckmann feels that the trailer for The Last of Us is “very representative of what we’re going for”. Druckmann also stated that he wants the story in The Last of Us to raise the bar for other video game developers, as he feels the standard of story-telling is not as good as it should be within the industry.