Craig Mazin is really, really excited to produce the TV show adaptation of The Last Of Us. So much so that he’s been calling it the greatest story in video games in public.
Exagerrating much? We’ll let Craig’s words speak for itself. This is what he said in a new interview with magazine Empire:
“It’s an open-and-shut case: this is the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.
They didn’t shoot anything out of their eyeballs. They were just people. And that, in and of itself, is remarkably rare in games. The fact that they kept it so grounded, and really made you feel – I had never experienced anything like it, and I’ve been playing video games since 1977.”
Now, before you pass judgement on Craig’s words, let us contextualize this partly by looking at who Craig is.
Mazin is best known as the writer, executive producer, and creator of historical TV miniseries Chernobyl, about the nuclear accident that occurred in the Ukrainian city of the same name. Chernobyl was one of the big TV shows of the 2019 season, receiving a staggering amount of nominations and awards. That includes nineteen nominations and three awards at the Emmys, and two awards at the Golden Globes.
Mazin got his start in the industry writing comedies like Scary Movie Parts 3 & 4, The Hangover Parts 2 & 3, and also other genre films, like superhero movie The Specials with James Gunn, and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
On a personal level, I think Mazin is just showing off his enthusiasm for the material. Maybe he is just a little biased, as he is executive producer on The Last of Us show, but he is entitled to his opinion.
I’m sure many fans would be eager to point to many other games they would cite as having better stories than The Last Of Us, from Assassin’s Creed, to Bioshock, to Mass Effect, to a completely different type of games, like Firewatch, The Magic Circle, and Gone Home, to perhaps a genre of games in between those, like Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Fallout 3.
In the meantime, The Last of Us Part 1, based on the PlayStation 5 remaster, recently received its highly anticipated PC release date. Huge fans of the games will want to watch the show as well; showrunners Mazin and Neil Druckmann will include new story elements to the show that were originally cut from the video games.
Source: The Last Of Us
