Development of The Last of Us
began developing The Last of Us in 2009. Sony Computer Entertainment published the action-adventure game for PlayStation 3 on June 14, 2013. The three-year development was led by game director Bruce Straley and creative director Neil Druckmann. In the game, players assume control of Joel, a middle-aged smuggler tasked with escorting a 14-year-old girl named Ellie across a post-apocalyptic United States in an attempt to create a potential cure against the world-ending infection to which Ellie is immune. Set 20 years after the outbreak has destroyed much of civilization, the game explores the possibility of the Cordyceps fungi infecting humans.
Though Ellie was initially intended to be Joel's daughter, the team found this to be too limiting in terms of further character development. The team chose Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson to portray Joel and Ellie, respectively. Providing both the voice and motion capture of the characters, Baker and Johnson assisted the team to develop the characters and help refine the story. The relationship between Joel and Ellie was the central focus of the game, and all other elements were developed around it. Various other characters were influenced by the story progression, ultimately becoming completely different from the initial vision.
The Last of Us features an original score composed by Argentine musician Gustavo Santaolalla. Known for his minimalist approach to composing, Santaolalla was contacted early in development. Naughty Dog took a similar minimalist approach to other elements of the game, including the action, sound design, and art design. In order to achieve the best work possible, the sound department began working early on the sound of the Infected. A similar direction was taken by the art department, whose designs influenced other elements of development. Naughty Dog overhauled their game engine for some elements, particularly lighting and animations.
The Last of Us was officially announced in 2011; it was heavily promoted and widely anticipated. Naughty Dog missed the original release date, delaying the game for further polishing. Naughty Dog marketed the game through video trailers and press demonstrations, announcing specific details about the game as development continued. Various special editions of the game were released, along with a comic book featuring characters from the game.
Background and overview
Preliminary work on The Last of Us, under the codename "Project Thing" or "T1", began after the release of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves in October 2009. For the first time in the company's history, developer Naughty Dog split into two teams to work on projects concurrently, with the first developing Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. Naughty Dog had attempted a dual team setup once before around the time Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was being developed in order to work on Jak and Daxter for the PlayStation Portable. This initial attempt failed due to the team having insufficient resources—though by the time that the company released two Uncharted games, co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra felt the team was experienced enough to try this again.Being a company integrated in a two-team setup, Naughty Dog initially felt it wise to work on a new entry to the Jak and Daxter series: creative director Neil Druckmann thought to work on an established franchise while testing out the setup, as he did not want the team to take on too many challenges at once, and Wells noticed that consumer demand was high for another entry in the series, with the second team positing the idea that they could apply their experience from Uncharted to Jak and Daxter. Wells said that their idea to apply aspects of Uncharted to the prospective Jak and Daxter game were making it entirely different to the spirit of the series, and felt the fans would not be pleased with this direction. The team, questioning their motives for developing another Jak and Daxter entry, decided to develop an original intellectual property following a discussion with Wells. Bruce Straley, who was employed at Naughty Dog in March 1999, was selected to lead the project as game director based on his experience and his work on previous projects, while Druckmann, an employee since 2004 and lead game designer on Uncharted 2, was chosen for his determination and talent for design about a year into the game's production.
Story and setting
As a student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004, Druckmann was tasked with creating a video game concept to present to film director George A. Romero, who would select a winner. Druckmann's idea was to merge the gameplay of Ico in a story set during a zombie apocalypse, like that of Romero's Night of the Living Dead, with a lead character similar to John Hartigan from Sin City. The lead character, a police officer, would be tasked with protecting a young girl; however, due to the lead character's heart condition, players would often assume control of the young girl, reversing the roles. After the idea did not win, Druckmann pitched it as a six-issue comic book called The Turning, for which he completed the script, but it was turned down by an indie comic book publisher. He later revisited this idea when creating the story of The Last of Us. An early concept for the game was titled Mankind, in which the infection only spread to women; the story followed the journey of a man protecting the only immune woman to bring her to a lab to create a potential cure. The concept was soon scrapped, particularly after female Naughty Dog employees voiced their concerns, as it was deemed misogynistic. Druckmann studied narratives from the genre during development, including the film Road to Perdition, which inspired the relationship between protagonists Joel and Ellie, particularly in Joel's attempts for Ellie to avoid becoming corrupted by violence.The Infected, a core concept of the game, were inspired by a segment of the BBC nature documentary Planet Earth, which featured the Cordyceps fungi. Though the fungi mainly infect insects, the game explores the concept of the fungus evolving and infecting humans, and the direct results of an outbreak of this infection. The game does not directly explain the cause of the fungus; Straley attributed this to the team's focus on the characters, as opposed to the fungus. They preferred to explain the events through subtext, rather than explicitly explaining the cause of the infection. Straley compared the subtext included in The Last of Us to that of BioShock Infinite. He felt that the latter had spawned various conversations within the industry, which he sees as a sign of a maturing industry. "I've seen enough good stories in books and film. Now I want to see them in video games", said Straley. The team used the concept of the Infected to force players to explore the limits of human perseverance. Throughout development, the team assured everyone that the Infected were strictly different from zombies.
In order to make the game as realistic as possible, the team conducted extensive research for the setting. Taking influences from Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, Naughty Dog created a world that would force players to make decisions and utilize their limited supplies effectively. In his research, Druckmann found inspiration in real historical events; the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic illustrated the depths of self-protection and paranoia capable by humans under threat of extinction, while the polio epidemic of the 1880s demonstrated the influences of socioeconomic classes when assigning blame in a great disaster. Druckmann and Straley have also cited Amy Hennig's "perfectionist mindset" and dedication to characters as an inspiration for the game's story; Hennig worked as head writer and creative director on the Uncharted series. The team also found creative similarity in Gravity, in terms of the game's simplicity and intensity.
When writing the script, Druckmann tried to exclude "fancy dialogue", keeping everything "short and natural". Community strategist Eric Monacelli has stated that the narrative's overarching themes are "love, loyalty and redemption", assuring their importance in the game, and fellow community strategist Arne Meyer said that the game's violence fit the narrative. Straley reiterated this, stating "you have to have the dark to have the light". Game designer Anthony Newman stated that the game deals with how people would react under pressure in extreme situations, which is represented through the violence and combat. The team felt interested in the story's dark themes juxtaposed against the "beautiful" settings.
A major motif present throughout the game is that "life goes on". A scene near the end of the game, in which Joel and Ellie discover a herd of giraffes, is referenced by many journalists as the denouement of this motif. Concept artist John Sweeney wrote that the scene was designed to "reignite lust for life", triggering her curiosity and forgetting the surrounding struggle and death. The sequence, borne from the idea of wild animals roaming outside of the quarantine zone, originally involved a herd of deer and later a zebra, but giraffes were settled on for their beauty and majesty. Sweeney stated that they were "the most remarkable thing Ellie could possibly encounter". Druckmann felt that the sequence "works because of all the horrible things" encountered beforehand. IGNs Lucy O'Brien wrote that the scene acts as a reminder of Ellie's age, despite having been outwardly "stripped of any semblance of a childhood", and Kotaku writer Kirk Hamilton found the scene to be a resemblance of hope for Ellie, having clearly suffered post-traumatic stress following her encounter with David. Druckmann felt it offered a fleeting "glimpse" of Ellie before the changing encounter with David, with that part of her being gone forever once the herd leaves.
In regards to the ending, the team intended for it to be open to interpretation. Straley has stated that it's "not your typical ending, but it’s still a nice resolution". Both he and Druckmann stated their frustration when players told them they wanted a choice at the game's ending; Straley said that most of these players told him they would have chosen the same ending as the game anyway. The original ending would have seen Ellie killing Tess at a point in development where she was posited as the main antagonist, with Ellie having killed nobody before other than infected to save Joel from being tortured by Tess. The team changed this and Ellie's character arc, as it would have made her disengaged from combat and boring, instead shifting the focus of her arc to center around the impacts of violence on her throughout the story.
While the game's focus testers hated the final ending, suggesting alternative methods, Druckmann continued with it; when the game's music and gameplay became closer to completion, the focus testers began appreciating the ending more. Druckmann enjoyed the ambiguity of Ellie's response to Joel's lie about killing the Fireflies—he had considered a happier resolution where the two settle with a group attempting to re-establish civilization in San Francisco, but said this was dishonest and would let them off too easily considering that Ellie would have seen past Joel's bad lying, thus making this unrealistic and warranting the unclear route. When discussing the ending, VentureBeat writer Dean Takahashi referenced the quote "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire", from Schindler's List, highlighting its inaccuracy: "You save a life and doom the whole world", he wrote.