How HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ Avoided the ‘Mistake’ of Video Game Adaptations

In the 2013 Sony Playstation 3 video game “The Last of Us,” you play (mostly) as Joel, a hardhearted smuggler who must transport a teenage girl, Ellie, through a post-apocalyptic American landscape riddled with zombies — and worse. 

Players must guide Joel and Ellie as they navigate through dilapidated office buildings and snowed-in ski resorts, and then utilize whatever weapons they have on them to take out the swarms of zombies — or mercenaries, or cannibals — that could just as easily kill themSo when the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, collaborated with Emmy-winning “Chernobyl” creator Craig Mazin to adapt “The Last of Us” into a series for HBO, one may have expected them to spend a great deal of time figuring out how best to incorporate those visceral gameplay sequences into the show.

Instead, says Mazin, “We thought about definitely not doing that.”

Mazin is a regular gamer, and was a massive fan of “The Last of Us” when it was first released. But he understood innately that it would be a “mistake” to try to replicate the way the game is played on the show itself.

“It’s the mistake other people have made, I think, in adaptation [of video games], because they think that’s what connects people to a game,” Mazin says. “But ‘The Last of Us,’ more than any other video game I’ve ever played, connected me to character and relationship. And the relationship between Joel and Ellie was the thing that we wanted to pull through the most.”

Druckmann also sees a crucial distinction between the experience of actively playing a game — as well as controlling the virtual camera that is capturing all the action — versus passively watching Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in a scripted TV series.

There’s different kinds of emotions you could draw from the player through an interactive space — where they swing the camera to, how they’re approaching the obstacle in front of them,” he says. “When you’re playing those sequences, that immersion really makes you connect with the player you’re controlling. Everything is only seen through their perspective. 

If we were to shoot those sequences as is, they would make for pretty boring action sequences. So one of the easiest decisions we made was like to say, ‘Let’s strip all those out. Let’s only have as much violence in this story as is required and no more.’ That allows the violence to have even more impact when you see it on screen than in the game.”

The series remains remarkably faithful to the story beats of the game, including some major action set pieces that will be familiar to anyone who has played it — like a scene in Episode 4 when Joel and Ellie are set upon by a squad of opportunistic raiders. But Mazin and Druckmann used those sequences to draw viewers deeper into the emotional arcs of the characters rather than the harrowing spectacle surrounding them.

“I want you to be with the characters. I want you to feel their relationship,” Mazin says. “That moment [in Episode 4] is really about Joel and Ellie. There are bullets that are whizzing over their head and slamming into the wall behind them. But it forces a moment to occur that changes who they are. That’s why I love those things.”

Druckmann also relished the opportunity to break away from the rigid mandate of the game to always remain in Joel’s perspective. He points to a scene in the series premiere between Ellie and Marlene (Merle Dandridge), the leader of a freedom fighter brigade called the Fireflies. In the game, Marlene only shows up “when Joel meets Marlene and no other time,” he says. “However, in the show, we were able to say oh, this moment that’s kind of hinted at, of what was it like when Ellie met Marlene for the first time, we get to dramatize that in the show.”

Source : https://variety.com/