Neil Druckmann, creator of “The Last of Us” and head of the prosperous Naughty Dog game studio, knows well the troubled history of adapting video game content into other mediums.
He’s seen it done badly by filmmakers who don’t understand the game and therefore mangle its essence in the translation to TV or film. At the same time, content creators who try to hold on too tightly to every detail of the game’s storyline will also struggle to make something that delivers as a TV show. At heart, the two are different things, Druckmann emphasized in an interview with Variety for the latest episode of podcast “Strictly Business.”
Another mistake adaptations make, Druckmann observed, is “staying so close to the source material that is built and designed and written for this other medium that has strengths and weaknesses, and trying to translate it as is, with no changes to this other medium that has different strengths and weaknesses.”
HBO is currently in production on the second season of “The Last of Us,” which it plans to debut in 2025, while PlayStation is preparing to release an “enhanced” version of Naughty Dog’s “The Last of Us Part II Remastered,” the source material for the second season of the TV series, for its upcoming high-end-graphics-focused PlayStation 5 Pro gaming console in November. As lead on both projects, Druckmann teased how the storyline in the second game will be expanded in Season 2 of “The Last of Us.”
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“What I’ve really enjoyed now is sometimes there are these people that have watched the show and then went and played the game and talked about, what a cool experience,” Druckmann said. “The game sometimes hints at stuff that we just don’t have time to get into the show that the game can, and vice versa. If you experience both, they’re both richer for it. And I love hearing that experience from people. They tell me, like, ‘I watch the show and then I play the game, and I really like how different the Bill sequence is, and that gave me this other insight into him.’ And there’s stuff in this season that I’m really excited about — stuff that we hinted at — one scene in particular comes to mind that I think fans of the game will eat up, because it really kind of tells you a lot of backstory of this important character that there wasn’t really a way for us to even do that in the game.”
Druckmann was under no pressure to take the popular PlayStation game into TV. The road that took him to bringing “Last of Us” to HBO lead through “Chernobyl.” Druckmann was so moved by the power of HBO’s 2019 miniseries about the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union that he sought out a lunch meeting with the series’ top writer-producer, Craig Mazin. The two got along so well he was finally open to considering a TV rendition of Joel and Ellie’s story, Druckmann says.
“I just wanted to meet the guy and just gush about how much I love [‘Chernobyl’], and pick his brain about how he put it together, and how he wrote it and how long was he working on it,” Druckmann said during a Sept. 18 interview held as part of Variety Presents: Gaming on TikTok Leadership Summit. “And as I’m there in this lunch with this guy — and he wanted to meet me, as well — he started talking about ‘The Last of Us’ and talking about it in such an intimate, fundamental way of understanding what it was that I’m like, Oh my God, this guy’s in love with this game that we’ve made.”
In the wide-ranging interview with Cynthia Littleton, Variety‘s co-Editor in chief, and Jennifer Maas, Variety‘s senior business writer, TV and video games, Druckmann details how the game development team at Naughty Dog, the PlayStation-run studio also behind the “Uncharted” game franchise, coordinates with Mazin and his team.
“The way we approach it, we start at the beginning of the season, and we break the season, and we look at the game. Our goal is to tell the best story possible,” Druckmann said. “And then our process is to just look at the content we have in the game and say, ‘OK, what are things that we both just overwhelmingly love and feel could be adapted as is?’ And we just put little check marks by those index cards to say, ‘OK, those things could just stay as is,’ and that becomes building blocks.”
Druckmann cited the much-praised Season 1 episode of “Last of Us” titled “Long, Long Time,” as an example of a significant distinction in the storyline for the game versus the series. Druckmann and Mazin were in sync that the video game characters of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) needed stronger emotional grounding in order to make the episode work, as it is a big departure from the overarching plot of Pedro Pascal’s Joel fighting to bring teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsey) through decimated cities to a medical facility where she may hold the key to a cure for the disease that has plagued the planet for 20 years.
“There are a couple of reasons why we did that. In the game, you get to know Bill through action, because the game really relies on interactivity and action,” Druckmann said. “And if we were to translate that sequence of Bill, it might be OK, it might even be good. It wouldn’t be great, because that amount of action on screen, when you’re not interacting with it, you don’t get the kind of tension or immersion you would get in the game. So instead, you just get spectacle, and that spectacle eventually would wear thin. So we knew that needed a big change.”
Mazin adjusted the story. “When you come into the game, Frank is not alive anymore. So we just hinted at this relationship between these two men. And here, instead, we said, well, let’s focus on that relationship,” Druckmann said.
It’s important to “recognize areas that just don’t work because they’re designed for this interactive medium, and then start brainstorming. How do we expand this world? How will we build this world? Sometimes the best surprises for players are when they get to see a backstory or like, oh, this was mentioned in the game, and now they get to see a full episode about this thing, again, like Bill and Frank. It makes the game richer. To me, that’s the best kind of adaptation,” he said.
