One of the biggest announcements over the past week has been the surprise announcement of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us at Spike’s VGAs.
According to Naughty Dog’s Christophe Balestra, the developers intend to “move the medium of video games into an area elevated in the same manner of respect” that films have done. A less savvy journalist might write something about how they want to create the Citizen Kane of video games, but I’ll simply say that they intend to move the medium forward, in a direction away from mindless shooting and big explosions.
“We want to redefine what our medium is even called,” he said to USA Today. “‘Video game’ is not an accurate name anymore. It is not necessarily a game with rules and a winner and a loser. It’s an experience.”
Naughty Dog creative head Neil Druckmann says the idea for The Last of Us came to him while watching the David Attenborough-narrated documentary Planet Earth on an episode about the cordyceps fungus, that literally turns ants into zombies.
Zombies aren’t unique by any measure of the imagination, but the concept of infecting humans with something akin to the cordyceps is certainly frightening.
According to Druckmann, the focus of the game will be on the relationship between Joel and Ellie, the two characters seen in the trailer.