One of the reasons that The Last Of Us is considered the best video game adaptation ever is its dedication to maintaining the lore and story of the two games that built it up. The first season of the live-action HBO series ended on Sunday, and fans were amazed by how incredible it and the whole season was and how accurate it was to the games. People even went only and put the original game next to the scenes from the adaptation and revealed how they were basically 1:1 in dialogue at times. That’s dedication.
That being said, the showrunners of the program, including the creator of The Last Of Us for Naughty Dog, Neil Druckmann, admitted that they had to make some changes and concessions as they went into live-action. One of the biggest being the Infected and how often they were used. Another was that they sometimes changed storylines or character beats because they could expand them and make them feel more personal. We saw this in the third episode, which was all about a side character in Bill that we met briefly in the game but saw many years of his life in the show. Or when Joel and Ellie went to Kansas City instead of Pittsburgh and met different characters there.
But another change that Ashley Johnson, the voice actor for Ellie in the games, liked had to do with the fungus that the Infected were born from. In the show, they did a deeper dive into what Cordyceps was and how it could be used to make the Infected more terrifying. They realized that there were fungi that had tendrils that spread out so far that if you affected them at one point, they would feel it everywhere else. So in episode two, we see Joel, Ellie, and Tess have to flee because they tripped the tendrils and brought a swarm of Infected to them, which led to Tess sacrificing herself to save the other two.
Johnson noted to ComicBook.com that she’d love this feature to be in the games:
“I’m watching the episodes, and I see how the fungus is a little different, and how where you step on things, it can attract hundreds. When I watched that, I was like, “I want to play that because it’s terrifying.”
Should her wish be granted, it’d have to be in The Last Of Us Part 3, which has not been confirmed yet by Naughty Dog. Not yet, that is.
